Barclays in the news: an app store for banks

Barclays has agreed to participate in a trial of LedgerConnect, a distributed ledger platform built by the technology company IBM and the financial market infrastructure CLS.

LedgerConnect is designed to ensure that financial institutions will be able to transact with each other using a standard set of apps and services in areas such as customer compliance checks, sanctions screening, collateral management and market data.

Barclays is one of nine financial services institutions involved in the proof of concept (PoC) trial of the new platform, which is being billed as an “app store for financial institutions”.

Explaining the move, Lee Braine, from the Chief Technology Office of Barclays’ Investment Bank, was quoted in City AM: "Barclays is participating in this so we can gain an understanding and experience of a new network for blockchain applications – and also test some candidate use cases on that network."

CLS and IBM have said they hope LedgerConnect will accelerate the adoption of blockchain by banks, as building and testing applications individually for each client would be too costly and time-consuming.