Coinprism and Openchain chosen to join Accenture Fintech Innovation Lab

Coinprism, which last year released enterprise blockchain Openchain, is joining the Accenture Fintech Innovation Lab.

Accenture and a panel of banks in charge of selecting promising FinTech start-ups recognised the potential of Openchain and selected Coinprism to be amongst the six companies to join the program, said a statement.

The six start-ups will spend 12 weeks working with financial institutions including Credit Suisse, Royal Bank of Scotland, Citi and State Street. While Openchain is 100% open source software, Coinprism plans to offer enterprise support contracts to companies using it, much like Red Hat does with Linux, and also offer customised solutions for financial institutions.

The model has sparked interest amongst competitors, and IBM and the Linux Foundation recently formed an alliance replicating the Openchain model with their Hyperledger project. Openchain, however, is still 12 months ahead in terms of product development, and has been "code-complete" and fully functional since last year, the statement added.

Flavien Charlon, founder of Coinprism, said: "We are extremely excited to be joining the Accenture Fintech Innovation Lab. The banks in the program are keen to be working with us; while they hear a lot about Blockchain technology, very few of the vendors have a finished and usable product".

Openchain also recently got selected to pitch in New York for the finals of the Santander Distributed Ledger Challenge. Openchain is also one of Blockchain solutions offered via Microsoft through their Microsoft Azure offering.

Charlon, an ex-Microsoft software engineer, has been experimenting with coloured coins on the Bitcoin Blockchain and developed a standard called Open Assets, now used by companies such as Nasdaq, Overstock and First Data, and later releasing Openchain,

Coinprism was founded in 2014 and is backed by the Blockchain start-up accelerator Boost VC and Draper Associates.