“This is an important step towards broadening the use and being able to establish Corda as a market standard for handling distributed ledger technology,” says Paula da Silva, Head of Transaction Services at SEB and the only Nordic representative on R3’s board.
The goal is to create an open, secure and scalable blockchain platform for all types of payments, business transactions and contracts. It is based on the distributed ledger principle, which simply means that the parties to a transaction share a joint, secure register, which both parties can rely on.
They thereby avoid double work and the risks for errors that arise in the current situation when each party itself handles all contracts, agreements and registers of financial transactions.
Global collaboration
R3 was established in 2015 in collaboration with a consortium of some 40 international banks, including SEB. Just over a year ago a holding company was formed, in which SEB became the largest Nordic investor.
The launch of Corda Enterprise entails a technical update that will make it easier for users – both banks and others – to link into the platform via their own IT infrastructures.
Aside from the work on developing the Corda infrastructure platform, a number of other development projects are in progress focusing on various types of financial services. Among these, SEB has participated in pilot projects in areas such as trade finance, invoice financing, Know Your Customer routines and payments.