Nine of the largest investment banks, including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Credit Suisse, are planning to develop common standards for blockchain technology in an effort to broaden its use across financial services.
The group are looking to channel data, ideas and financial backing to a start-up called R3CEV, a New York-based group of trading and technology executives.
September 15, 2015 (New York/San Francisco/London) – Nine of the world's leading banks today announced the formation of a partnership to design and deliver advanced distributed/shared ledger technologies to global financial markets. The project – in addition to developing commercial applications – will seek to establish consistent standards and protocols for this emerging technology across the financial industry in order to facilitate broader adoption and gain a network effect. Led by financial innovation company R3, the partnership is comprised of a group of banks including Barclays, BBVA, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Credit Suisse, J.P. Morgan, State Street, Royal Bank of Scotland and UBS. R3 CEO and former ICAP Electronic Broking CEO David Rutter will lead the project, and more banks are expected to pledge their support in the coming weeks.
A report commissioned by secretive distributed ledger consulting group R3CEV and authored by bitcoin developer Peter Todd has raised questions about the ability of the Ripple protocol to serve the needs of global financial institutions in its current iteration...While concerns were raised, however, the report was viewed by some contributors as "the first serious, non-malicious attempt at pointing out perceived weaknesses in the system".
Originally published July 21st, 2015
About a year ago, R3CEV founder David Rutter and partner Todd McDonald traveled to California to survey the growing landscape of digital currency startups for potential investment opportunities. After days of meeting with numerous companies – in addition to back-and-forth trips on the highway – Rutter says that he had a moment of deja vu.
“I had seen it before where a lot of money – a lot of California-based venture money – was being thrown at PowerPoints and half-baked ideas about how this new technology was going to change finance as we know it," he recalled.
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Originally published June 24, 2015
The firm plans to allow dealers and investors to stream live prices to counterparts whose identities are known to each other in order to provide a better trading environment, Rutter said in an interview.
“There’s an under-served part of the market such as regional dealers and smaller brokers that find it very expensive and difficult to keep up technologically with larger dealers and faster traders,” said Rutter, who was chief executive officer of ICAP’s electronic broking unit. “To compete effectively on BrokerTec or ESpeed, these smaller brokers have to make a very significant investment.”
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Originally published August 28th, 2015
One of the most advanced of those conversations has been coordinated by a start-up known as R3Cev that is led by a former Wall Street executive, David E. Rutter. R3Cev has put together models for how banks could trade foreign currencies on a communally maintained spreadsheet like the blockchain, according to people briefed on the project. It was R3Cev that convened the April meeting at Bank of America, which was attended by more than 75 people from 15 financial institutions, these people said.
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