Korean Financial Firm Joins Blockchain Group R3
Hana Financial Group, a large bank holding company that specializes in a multitude of financial services including banking has now joined the financial blockchain consortium led by R3.
Global private blockchain consortium R3 sees its first Korean financial institution join its ranks with the inclusion of South Korea’s Hana Financial Group.
In a report by Korea Herald, the financial group revealed its intention to apply blockchain technology into its roster of services including global transactions and security protection.
The reason for its foray into distributed ledger technology according to Hana Financial, is the innovation of a distributed databases serving as a record of information, as opposed to a single centralized database. Manipulation, tampering and hacking of data can be prevented with the innovation, the firm stated.
The news comes at a time when the wider financial industry that includes banks, stock exchanges, and even central banks that have a part to play in global economics are taking a good long look into blockchain innovation, the technology that powers Bitcoin.
In a press statement, Hana Financial stated:
Hana Financial will use blockchain technology in an effort to further map out its global expansion strategy.
Furthermore, the Korean firm also revealed that the efficient, cost-cutting properties of the distributed ledgers over conventional financial systems is another reason for the group joining R3.
Asian financial firms and banks have increasingly made inroads into developing blockchain solutions. Japanese bank Mizuho Financial Group recently announced a partnership with IT provider Cognizant to build distributed ledger solutions for secure record keeping of documents belonging to Mizuho’s various companies around the world.
SBI Sumishin Net Bank Ltd., another Japanese bank will get a proof-of-concept blockchain solution due to its collaboration with several technology startups in Japan.
In December 2015, Singapore-based DBS announced a successful distributed ledger experiment for trade finance, one achieved in collaboration with London-based Standard Chartered. The announcement marked one of the earliest examples of two banks outside the R3 space collaborating together to develop a proof-of=concept distributed ledger for financial services.
Featured image from Wikimedia.
