By
Godfrey Benjamin
November 15th, 2023
The UK banking giant has presented the new smart contracts app designed to record and manage financial agreements among its clients.
Barclays has introduced the new platform during the bank’s accelerator program, which took place at The O2 in London. The app is based on Corda, the distributed ledger system that was earlier revealed by the R3 CEV consortium.
“The technology we have used for our demonstration is the R3 consortium’s prototype platform called Corda. What you will now see is the first public demonstration of an application using the underlying Corda platform. This is history in the making,” Braine told International Business Times.
Currently, banks have to spend too much effort and financial resources on the management of legal agreements, what can be simplified by using smart contracts and shared ledgers.
“I emphasise to you that legal documentation processes can be lengthy, cumbersome and manual. Smart Contract Templates could simplify all of that and, because they are templates designed for reuse, they could drive the industry’s adoption of standards that are legally enforceable,” he said.
During the presentation, Braine showed a prototype of an investment banking app and showed the process of conducting an interest rate swap deal. He noted that in comparison with the classic blockchain system the smart contract data can only be seen by those who are entitled to view it.
While developing the platform over the last months, Barclays collaborated with University College London’s Centre for Blockchain Technologies, the International Swaps and Derivatives Association, the banking services company Société Générale and Techstars, which powered the Barclays accelerator.
“This type of solution will take time to build. But it has the potential to transform legal documentation and enable legally-enforceable smart contacts. Now that Barclays has planted the seed of Smart Contract Templates, further collaboration is required to grow this idea,” Braine stated.
“It will only really work if the industry is behind it. So if you are part of the industry, and you are excited by the prototype, I encourage you to participate in a Smart Contract Templates summit this June that will be organised by R3.”
The R3 CEV is aimed at driving the adoption of the distributed ledger technology in the financial industry. The project has already attracted over 40 banks, including Barclays, with the 12 new member banks joined the consortium in December of last year. This month, the Hana Financial Group signed up for the initiative, becoming the first Korean firm participating in the project.
Giving a speech at the New York Blockchain & Distributed Ledger Conference last week, the R3 CEV’s representatives uncovered that they are now working on eight projects targeted at facilitating financial transactions in such sectors as corporate bonds, system interoperability, settlement, insurance, trade finance and swaps.
