Synchrony Financial joins R3 distributed ledger consortium

Financial innovation firm R3 has announced the addition of Synchrony Financial, the first credit card company to join the consortium of more than 70 large financial institutions, looking to leverage the power of shared-ledger-inspired technologies within global financial markets.

Synchrony Financial will be collaborating with R3's member banks and financial institutions, and working with R3's team of financial industry veterans, technologists and blockchain and cryptocurrency experts. This collaboration involves 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, said a statement.

Consortium members work closely with R3 to develop Corda™, the 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, it said.

Synchrony Financial Executive vice president and CIO, Carol Juel, said: "We are excited to be a part of the R3 consortium to explore use cases for distributed and shared-ledger technology. Having access to the R3 network and research will be valuable as we think through the many opportunities for blockchain to be leveraged across the consumer finance landscape."

David Rutter, CEO of R3, commented: "R3 is the largest collaborative consortium of its kind in financial markets, comprising members from all corners of the industry. We welcome Synchrony Financial to the consortium and look forward to giving them access to a huge pool of expertise from electronic financial markets and distributed and shared ledger technologies, led by our team of technologists and industry experts."

Synchrony Financial joins the global network of R3 partners united in its lab environment, the R3 Lab and Research Centre, which has quickly become a centre of gravity for collaborative research and testing of distributed and shared-ledger inspired technologies.