CREDIT SUISSE COMPLETES GLOBAL DISTRIBUTED LEDGER HACKATHON USING R3 TECHNOLOGY

Credit Suisse recently completed a global hackathon event to find cost savings and efficiency applications using R3’s Corda distributed ledger platform.

Teams from India, the United States, Great Britain and Poland competed to find cost savings under a 20:20 framework, meaning winning solutions needed to show the potential to reduce costs by twenty percent within twenty months.

“We see Blockchain as a disruptive technology that has real potential to reduce the bank’s operating costs and risk,” said Ray Mulligan, Chief Architect for Credit Suisse’s Global Markets division.  “The recent Credit Suisse blockchain hackathon reinforced that idea.  In just two days, we saw how quickly our developers were able to design and build blockchain-enabled applications that show the potential for this technology to drive significant efficiency and savings gains for the bank.”

The bank’s developers began work on January 24 in India to build distributed ledger applications across a variety of business lines and back-office functions. Work transitioned from Pune, Bangalore and Mumbai to London, Wroclaw, New York and Raleigh, North Carolina over the course of the first day, and continued through January 25. Credit Suisse committed to fund the leading solutions that showed 20:20 potential for further development and implementation.

Corda was designed specifically to address the cost and efficiency issues that have plagued banks and other financial institutions for decades. We made the platform available for open source development in order to encourage collaborative thinking and innovation, and this hackathon is the perfect example of what can be achieved when open communities combine expertise to address the real-world pain points affecting the industry.

Now, with the technology maturing, firms can find ways to drive additional benefits that might be more specific to their businesses. In just two days, Credit Suisse’s developers were able to design and build distributed ledger-enabled applications that show the potential for this technology to drive significant efficiency and savings gains for banks.

A big thanks to all involved at Credit Suisse for making this hackathon a tremendous success!