Financial innovation firm R3 has announced the addition of China Foreign Exchange Trade System (CFETS), China’s official interbank market trading platform, to its consortium to design and apply distributed and shared ledger-inspired technologies to global financial markets. Headquartered in Shanghai, CFETS provides a series of services covering issuance, trading, information and post-trade for cash and derivative RMB-denominated interest rate, exchange rate and related products.
CFETS will be collaborating with the world’s largest financial institutions to develop ground-breaking commercial applications for the financial services industry that leverage the appropriate elements of distributed and shared ledger technology.
The R3 team of financial industry veterans, technologists and blockchain and cryptocurrency experts collaborate with consortium members on 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.
Consortium members work closely with R3 to develop Corda™, its shared ledger platform specifically designed to record, manage and synchronise financial agreements between regulated financial institutions. It is heavily inspired by and captures the benefits of blockchain systems, without the design choices that make blockchains inappropriate for many banking scenarios.
David Rutter, CEO of R3 comments: “Acknowledging the Chinese renminbi’s growing prominence in trading and the crucial role China holds in the global financial markets, we are delighted to welcome CFETS to the R3 consortium. Their expertise will be an enormous asset as we develop universal applications for distributed ledger technology across increasingly globalised financial markets.”
Zaiyue Xu, Executive Vice President of CFETS, comments: “CFETS is committed to establishing technical standards and improving the ecosystem of China interbank market, and we have noticed that blockchain is an emerging technology with great promise to reshape the market. Through cooperation with R3, we hope to build the infrastructures and platforms for blockchain application in the financial market together with international counterparts.”
CFETS will join the global network of R3 partners united in its lab environment, the R3 Lab and Research Centre, which has quickly become a center of gravity for collaborative research and testing of distributed and shared-ledger inspired technologies.
