Standard Chartered Joins Enterprise Ethereum Alliance

Singapore – Standard Chartered today announced that it has joined the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA). The EEA is a members-driven standards organisation whose charter is to develop open, blockchain specifications that drive harmonisation and interoperability for businesses and consumers worldwide – one that is backed by the largest developer community in the world and a worldwide member-base.

As a member of the EEA, Standard Chartered will collaborate with industry leaders in pursuit of Ethereum-based enterprise technology best practices, open standards, and open-source reference architectures. The Bank views blockchain as central to banking and commerce in the digital era, so transactions can be verified, secure and processed in real time.

“Technology enables us to facilitate trade and investment across our footprint markets, improving client experiences and offering new services,” said Dr Michael Gorriz, Group Chief Information Officer at Standard Chartered. “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.”

The EEA membership base represents hundreds of companies from every region of the world across a wide variety of business sectors, including technology, banking, legal, government, healthcare, energy, pharmaceuticals, marketing, and insurance. The EEA’s Special Interest and Technical Working Groups define market requirements needed to contribute to future versions of the EEA specification, helping to scale the number of market categories the specification supports.

Standard Chartered has been working with various industry partners and fintechs to explore the use of innovative technology to make financial systems more efficient and accessible for its clients. The Bank is one of the founding members of Contour, 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. It is also 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.

Other initiatives also include the Bank’s partnership with Ant Financial to launch the world’s first blockchain-enabled cross-border remittance service from Hong Kong to the Philippines, as well as a collaboration with Siemens Financial Services and TradeIX, a digital trade provider, to create blockchain-based smart guarantees for trade finance. The bank has also invested in Ripple, a leading distributed ledger company. It is participating in regulator-led initiatives including Project Inthanon in Thailand led by the Central Bank of Thailand to develop a Central Bank Digital Currency; and Project Ubin led by Monetary Authority of Singapore to explore the use of distributed ledger technology for the clearance and settlement of payments and securities.

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Julie Gibson
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