London-headquartered international banking group Standard Chartered has announced that it has joined the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA).
Standard Chartered opened its first branch on 29 December 1853. Since then, it has grown to 1,026 branches worldwide (across 60 countries), and 86,000 employees (who come from 125 countries).
It is listed on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) and two of Asia’s largest stock exchanges (Hong Kong Stock Exchange and the National Stock Exchange of India). Currently, it has a market cap of over GBP 23.7 billion (around USD 30.35 billion).
The EEA is a “member-led industry organization whose objective is to drive the use of Ethereum blockchain technology as an open-standard to empower ALL enterprises.” It has two objectives:
- “Deliver an open, standards-based architecture and specification to accelerate the adoption of Enterprise Ethereum.”
- “Create world-class Enterprise Ethereum Client Specifications and testing and certification programs that ensure interoperability, multiple vendors of choice, and lower costs for its members.”
Standard Chartered’s press release says that it views blockchain “as central to banking and commerce in the digital era, so transactions can be verified, secure and processed in real time..”
Dr Michael Gorriz, Group Chief Information Officer at Standard Chartered, had this to say:
Technology enables us to facilitate trade and investment across our footprint markets, improving client experiences and offering new services. We are excited to be a part of the EEA and look forward to opportunities where we can collaborate with other leading industry players to deepen blockchain research and application in the banking sector.
It also mentions that the bank “is one of the founding members of Voltron, a blockchain-based open industry platform that was launched in October 2018 to digitally create, exchange, approve and issue Letters of Credits (LCs), and recently issued the first LC over the platform for the oil industry.” Furthermore, the bank is “co-creating blockchain-enabled supply chain financing solutions with China-based Linklogis, completing its first joint deep-tier supply chain financing transaction for Digital Guangdong and its upstream suppliers.”
Some other technology initiatives the bank is involved in include “partnership with Ant Financial to launch the world’s first blockchain-enabled cross-border remittance service from Hong Kong to the Philippines” and its “collaboration with Siemens Financial Services and TradeIX, a digital trade provider, to create blockchain-based smart guarantees for trade finance.”
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