Canada’s Large Credit Union Coalition Joins R3 Blockchain Consortium

Canada’s Large Credit Union Coalition (LCUC), an alliance that brings together the chief information officers (CIOs) of 16 largest credit unions in the country, has joined R3, the New York-based blockchain consortium.

R3’s blockchain consortium currently consists of about 200 entities including financial institutions, tech firms, trade associations and other service providers. LCUC, which has more than 3 million corporate members, is looking at new technologies that can improve the competitiveness of Canadian credit unions. The members of LCUC together have assets over $125 billion.

As a memer of the blockchain consortium, LCUC will have the opportunity to study and implement Corda, the flagship platform of R3’. Corda is an enterprise level, open-source distributed ledger platform built to carryout complex transactions in the financial sector.

R3 CEO David Rutter stated the following on the partnership

“Canada is a hub for blockchain innovation and remains a key market for R3. We are pleased to welcome LCUC on board and look forward to working with its group of CIOs to enrich the services offered to their members with Corda’s unique enterprise-focused blockchain technology.”

Yves Auger, CIO at Servus Credit Union, part of the LCUC, said

“The LCUC is thrilled to be working with R3 and exploring the distributed ledger technology space more closely, building on some of our members’ successes with the technology.”

The coalition has previously worked on projects like remote check deposits and mobile payments. According to the press release, the LCUC is also pursuing development in the areas of artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and payments modernization.

Last week, there were reports of R3 planning to go public through the IPO process. However, R3 has denied such reports. Before this incident, some of the former staffs of R3 had spread rumor that the company is running out of money. R3’s CEO published a post refuting such claims.

Notably, a week earlier, R3 launched Corda Enterprise, the commercial version of its Corda platform. Corda Enterprise comes with the world’s only blockchain application firewall, which facilitates the platform to be deployed within corporate data centres while retaining the ability to communicate securely with other nodes in any corner of the globe.

R3 revealed through a blog post in June that 39 financial institutions have completed more than 300 transactions through its KYC application. According to R3, the transactions were performed across eight time zones in 19 countries. Banks and other participants in the transaction were able to request access to customer KYC data, while clients were able to grant or deny access. The participants in the project ran 45 nodes on Microsoft’s cloud platform Azure and shared relevant data using CorDapp deployed on the Corda network.