NatWest and Large Credit Union Coalition join R3’s blockchain club
R3 has welcomed NatWest to its Marco Polo trade finance network, and Canada’s Large Credit Union Coalition (LCUC) to its blockchain ecosystem.
The Marco Polo initiative is coordinated by TradeIX and R3. Other banks involved in the project include BNP Paribas, Commerzbank, ING, Standard Chartered, Natixis, Bangkok Bank, SMBC, DNB and OP Financial Group.
Rowan Austin, head of trade and working capital product at NatWest, says the Marco Polo network “will help reduce much of the time, expense and uncertainty in conducting international trade”.
Marco Polo is powered by R3’s Corda technology and APIs, which are “purpose-built” for the global trade ecosystem.
R3 says it allows banks to offer participants and to “easily integrate into trade orchestrations bringing in enterprise resource planning (ERP), procure to pay, logistics, payment, insurance data, real-time into the transactions”.
Meanwhile, LCUC, a group comprising the CIOs of the 16 largest credit unions in Canada, has joined R3’s blockchain ecosystem.
Representing over $125 billion in assets, LCUC will join R3’s network of over 200 financial institutions, regulators, trade associations, professional services firms and technology companies to develop on Corda.
Yves Auger, CIO at Servus Credit Union, says: “The wealth of knowledge and possible use cases we can dive into in short order were among some of the key reasons we felt partnering with R3 was the right choice for us.”
Last month, R3 said with its partners they had completed over 300 transactions on a know your customer (KYC) application built on the Corda platform during a four-day collaborative trial.
