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UK banking giant Barclays took another step toward positioning itself at the forefront of innovators in the blockchain sector last week with the news it had become the first to trial Corda, a new distributed ledger platform from partner R3CEV.
The prototype, demoed at the Barclays Accelerator in London last week, follows a particularly active period for Barclays, which earlier this month revealed it would provide banking services to blockchain payments startup Circle, and earlier this year, participated in a test of a private version of the Ethereum blockchain with 11 R3 member banks.
In interview, Dr Lee Braine of the Investment Bank CTO Office at Barclays, spoke to what it described as a broader need for leadership from the banking industry should the industry want blockchain technology to “reach maturity”.
Braine said that Barclays aims to devote time and expertise to the ecosystem, specifically to areas where banks have more experience than innovators. In particular, he cited Barclays and its drive to create smart contracts templates, as an example of this ongoing work.
Braine told CoinDesk:
"What we’ve been doing in the last year, working with other banks through consortium and directly with startups, has been providing feedback around tech… In this case, we have subject matter expertise around legal documentation around the bank. Startups may not have that, so we thought by showcasing this, we’d look to encourage other banks to move into this space."
To Braine, step one for the proof-of-concept was to determine how blockchain-based smart contracts could be connected to real-world legal contracts. This possibility, he said, could enable the simplification of legal documentation, while mutualizing costs.
Braine said that Barclays approached the challenge by devoting a full team to its incubator program for the project, during which these employees liaised heavily with internal legal teams working on derivatives.
"We’ve taken in their preferences in order to build the interface," Braine said. "The lifecycle, the workflow ... these aspects were driven by the legal document automation team."
But Barclays is not alone in identifying this area as one where blockchain and distributed ledger tech could play a role. Industry startup CommonAccord, incubated in the BNP Paribas accelerator, has also set its sights on codifying and automating legal contracts.
Moving up the chain to design Smart Contract Templates as "Code is Law" morphs into "Law is Code". Nice mention of two of our Initiative partners BNP Paribas & Common Accord !