South Africa's Absa bank is the first bank in Africa to join the R3 Consortium, a partnership to design and apply blockchain's distributed and shared ledger-inspired technologies to global financial markets.

The blockchain was popularised as the technology behind the digital currency, Bitcoin. Distributed ledgers is a key feature of the technology and are records of consensus with a cryptographic audit trail maintained and validated by several separate nodes.

The distributed ledgers allow the validation of transactions (depending on the nature of their operation) when members of a network try to submit information to a network such as R3 Consortium.

The R3 team is a collaboration established with the aim of advancing blockchain technology and assisting financial institutions to meet their technical requirements, specifically in terms of interoperability and integration with legacy systems.

Members of the network keep a copy of the ledger (the template they all work with) and they are immediately aware of any new version of transaction (or information) added to it. The ledger also leaves behind a cryptographically assured audit trail and timestamp (or record).

Absa, a subsidiary of Barclays Africa Group, is the first from Africa to join the R3 Consortium and its affiliation is expected to enhance the development of a working relationship with other African banks to introduce the distributed ledger-based banking solution to the continent.

"Collaborating and working together with R3 allows us to unlock the value that blockchain could hold for trade in Africa and it was therefore only obvious we joined R3," says Barclays Africa's Andrew Baker via email. "Joining R3 gives us access to an international community of financial institutions and shared infrastructure to assist us in solving common problems. More than this, R3 gives us access to brilliant technologies.

Baker added that through R3, they are working with major South African banks to create a multi-cloud Ethereum network to enable a first workshop in a month or so. "Currently the thinking is to look at the syndicated loans processes, but this may change depending on our collective view closer to the time," he noted.

"Our primary focus right now is on the local interbank space, particularly manual interbank processes. We believe that several of these interbank processes are ripe for disruption and could offer materially better customer experiences if we used distributed ledgers. We are not particularly active with crypto currencies like BitCoin."