Financial technology innovator R3 has announced completion of the first two of three tranches in its Series A fundraising round, securing $107 million USD in the world’s largest distributed ledger technology (DLT) investment to date. R3 is the largest consortium of global financial institutions collaborating to develop a platform and commercial applications for DLT.
It is a strategic investment with high business value. We see a clear business value in being on this platform, which has the potential to become part of a new global infrastructure. This is something that we as individual bank cannot develop ourselves.
R3’s globally diverse group of investors represents an equal geographical split across Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Americas, counting over 40 participants from over 15 countries which include:
Banco Bradesco [1]
Bangkok Bank
Bank of America Merrill Lynch
Bank of Montreal
Bank of New York Mellon
Barclays
BBVA
BNP Paribas
B3 (BM&FBOVESPA and Cetip)
Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce
Citi
Commerzbank
Commonwealth Bank of Australia
Credit Suisse
CTBC Financial Holding
Daiwa Securities Group
Danske Bank
Deutsche Bank
HSBC
ING
Intel Capital
Intesa Sanpaolo [2]
Itaú Unibanco S.A.
Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG)
Mizuho
Natixis
Nomura
Nordea Bank
Northern Trust
OP Cooperative
Ping An
Royal Bank of Canada
SBI Group
SEB
Societe Generale
Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation
TD Bank Group
Temasek
The Bank of Nova Scotia
The Royal Bank of Scotland
U.S. Bank
UBS AG
Wells Fargo
Westpac
[1] Investment made indirectly through an investment fund, FIP InovaBra I, of which Banco Bradesco BBI S.A., a controlled subsidiary of Banco Bradesco S.A., is a quotaholder.
[2] Intesa Sanpaolo will invest through its affiliate Neva Finventures, the Corporate Venture Capital of the Group
The first two tranches of the Series A round were made available only to R3 members, while the third and final tranche – which opens later this year – will be accessible to R3 members and non-R3 institutional investors.
R3 will use the funds to accelerate technology development and expand strategic partnerships for product deployment. The company’s efforts will be focused on Corda, R3’s DLT platform for regulated financial institutions, and its infrastructure network, which will support a vast range of partner-built financial applications that interoperate seamlessly with each other, existing systems and networks.
Since the launch of its DLT initiative in September 2015, R3 has grown from a staff of eight finance and technology veterans with nine bank members to a global team of over 110 professionals serving over 80 global financial institutions and regulators on six continents. The company’s work is further supported by over 2,000 technology, financial, and legal experts drawn from its global member base. That base includes banks, clearing houses, exchanges, market infrastructure providers, asset managers, central banks, conduct regulators, trade associations, professional services firms and technology companies.
David E. Rutter, CEO of R3, comments:
“This investment is unprecedented. Many of the world’s largest financial firms have come together not just with capital support, but with a robust commitment to work with R3 in developing industry solutions that will be the building blocks of the new financial services infrastructure. We’ve got unparalleled momentum.
“R3 has proven the collaborative model can successfully drive innovation in financial services to a degree never before seen. In the space of less than two years, we have built a network of over 80 members, launched an open-source distributed ledger platform specifically for wholesale financial markets, conducted over 60 detailed use cases across a variety of asset classes, led the way in regulatory engagement on behalf of the broader DLT community and are ahead of schedule for initial commercial deployments this year. We are on our way to becoming a new operating system for financial services.”