Thomson Reuters joins R3 blockchain consortium
David Rutter, CEO of R3
Thomson Reuters has joined R3’s partnership to design and apply distributed and shared ledger-inspired tech to global financial markets.
Thomson Reuters will contribute insights from its work with customers to “drive product innovation and transformation in the financial sector using distributed ledger technologies”.
David Rutter, CEO of R3, says the deal is “another significant milestone”. He said the same when South African heavyweight Absa recently became the first bank in Africa to join R3’s consortium.
The R3 team comprises financial industry veterans, technologists and blockchain and cryptocurrency experts who conduct research, experimentation, design and engineering to “help advance this technology to meet banking requirements for identity, privacy, security, scalability, interoperability and integration with legacy systems”.
R3 recently unveiled Corda, its shared ledger platform “specifically designed” to record, manage and synchronise financial agreements between regulated financial institutions. R3 says it is “heavily inspired by and captures the benefits of blockchain systems, without the design choices that make blockchains inappropriate for many banking scenarios”.
Thomson twins
Thomson Reuters is no stranger to teamwork – with two notable and recent developments.
It teamed with Imperial College London to work on research projects to look at big data challenges impacting global fintech and regtech.
It also reached an agreement with CME Group to implement connectivity between their instant messaging networks, Thomson Reuters Eikon Messenger and CME Pivot Instant Messaging.
