R3 is an enterprise blockchaintechnology company. It leads an ecosystem of more than 300 firms working together to build distributed applications on top of Corda for usage across industries such as financial services, insurance, healthcare, trade finance, and digital assets. It is headquartered in New York City. It was founded in 2014 by David E Rutter. The current CTO is Richard G. Brown.
Corda
R3's blockchain platform Corda records, manages and synchronises financial agreements and standardises data and business processes. R3 made Corda open source in November 2016, allowing the global developer community to contribute to it, build on top of it and to drive its design and adoption. In March 2018, with partner HQLAx, R3 completed its first live securities lending transaction on the platform between Credit Suisse and ING. HSBC used Corda to finance the trade of a cargo of soyabeans shipped from Argentina to Malaysia. By using Corda's blockchain technology, HSBC was able to process the relevant documents in 24 hours and cut costs. This represented the world's first trade finance transaction using a single blockchain platform. Financial technology company Finastra operates a syndicated lending platform on Corda that has been pioneered by Natwest. Regulators and central banks are also active on the platform. The UK's Financial Conduct Authority developed a prototype for regulatory reporting of mortgage transactions on Corda with the Royal Bank of Scotland Group and another global bank, while the Hong Kong Monetary Authority and Bank of Thailand are collaborating on a central bank digital currency initiative on the platform.
History
The consortium started on September 15, 2015 with nine financial companies: Barclays, BBVA, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Royal Bank of Scotland, State Street, and UBS. On September 29, 2015 an additional 13 financial companies joined: Bank of America, BNY Mellon, Citi, Commerzbank, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Morgan Stanley, National Australia Bank, Royal Bank of Canada, Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken, Société Générale, and Toronto-Dominion Bank. Financial Times reporter Kadhim Shubber wrote that the new additions are "a sign the industry is gathering behind R3 in one potential implementation of the distributed ledger technology behind the cryptocurrencybitcoin." On October 28, 2015 an additional three financial companies joined: Mizuho Bank, Nordea, and UniCredit. On November 19, 2015 an additional five financial companies joined: BNP Paribas, Wells Fargo, ING, Macquarie Group and the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. On December 17, 2015, an additional 12 financial companies joined: BMO Financial Group, Danske Bank, Intesa Sanpaolo, Natixis, Nomura, Northern Trust, OP Financial Group, Banco Santander, Scotiabank, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, U.S. Bancorp and Westpac Banking Corporation. Toyota Financial Services joined in June and MetLife joined in August 2016. In November 2016, Goldman Sachs, Santander and Morgan Stanley each withdrew from the consortium. On December 14, 2016, Credicorp becomes the first Spanish-speaking Latin American member of R3. In April 2017, JPMorgan Chase quit R3. On May 23, 2017, R3 publicly announced that it had secured the largest ever investment for distributed ledger technology with USD 107 million as part of its Series A funding round, from over 40 institutions, spanning over 15 countries globally. Also in May 2017, the Bank of Canada and Payments Canada, as well of some Canadian chartered banks, announced the results of a year-long trial of R3 consortium's DLT which will not be adopted at this time for reasons of transaction privacy and scalability. R3 has been represented by fintech PR firm, Chatsworth Communications, since launch. In August 2017, The Colombian central bank Banco de la República Colombia partnered with R3 consortium for the testing of Corda. In September 2017, R3 sued Ripple for specific performance of an option agreement in which Ripple agreed to sell up to five billion XRPs for a price of $.0085. Ripple countersued, claiming that R3 reneged on a number of contractual promises, and was simply acting in a spirit of opportunism after the cryptocurrency soared more than 30 times over. In September 2018, R3 and Ripple reached a settlement of all outstanding litigation. On December 6, 2017, Amazon Web Services announced a partnership with R3 to allow the company's Corda platform to become one of the first ever distributed ledger technology solutions on the AWS. Corda allows users to deploy DApps onto the AWS platform and to create new apps directly. In March 2018, Credit Suisse and ING completed the first live securities lending transaction worth €25 million using an application from HQLAx, a financial technology firm, that was built on Corda. In April 2018, Finastra launched the first live application on R3's Corda. Fusion LenderComm is a blockchain-powered platform for syndicated loans. In 2019, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation announced it expected to go live before the end of the year with a blockchain-based trade information warehouse of derivatives, built with R3, Axoni and IBM. In January 2020, the Hong Kong and Thai central banks announced a project with R3 that uses central bank digital currencies on Corda to make payments between the two countries more efficient.
