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(Clarifies Richard Gendal Brown's title to show he is chieftechnology officer in para 6)
By Jemima Kelly
LONDON, Nov 19 (Reuters) - Five more banks have joined aglobal consortium working on ways blockchain technology can beused in financial markets, the firm leading the project said onThursday, as it brought in experts from the worlds of bankingand technology.
BNP Paribas, Wells Fargo, ING,MacQuarie and the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce will join 25 other banks including JPMorgan and Citi inthe initiative, led by New York-based financial tech firm R3.
Most of the world's biggest banks, with the exception ofChinese lenders, have now signed up to the initiative. Itrepresents the first time banks have collaborated on how thetechnology that underpins bitcoin, a controversial, web-based"cryptocurrency", can be used in finance.
"The R3 collaborative model is the best way to quickly,efficiently and cost effectively deliver these new technologiesto global financial markets," said New York-based R3's CEO DavidRutter, formerly CEO of electronic trading at ICAP, one of theworld's largest interdealer brokers.
The blockchain works as a huge, decentralised ledger ofevery bitcoin transaction ever made, which is verified andshared by a global network of computers and therefore isvirtually tamper-proof. The Bank of England has a team dedicatedto it and calls it a "key technological innovation".
R3's chief technology officer is IBM's former executivearchitect of banking innovation, Richard Gendal Brown, and onThursday the firm announced it had brought in James Carlyle, whowas previously Barclays' chief engineer for bankingarchitecture.
R3 has also brought in bitcoin core developer Mike Hearn, aswell as fincancial cryptographer Ian Grigg and bitcoin expertTim Swanson. (Reporting by Jemima Kelly; Editing by Janet Lawrence)
