Hyperledger, a cross-industry collaborative blockchain initiative, has announced that leading global financial services provider Deutsche Bank has joined the project as a Premier member.

Deutsche Bank joins existing premier members, which include the likes of Accenture, American Express, Baidu, Daimler, IBM, Intel, and J.P. Morgan, among others.

"Adding a major bank like Deutsche Bank to our list of Premier members demonstrates the value Hyperledger brings to the financial services market," said Brian Behlendorf, Executive Director, Hyperledger. "With their help and global reach, we look forwarding to driving more global production deployments like Know Your Customer (KYC), payments, trading and others based on Hyperledger technologies."

Hyperledger counts over 230 organisations from finance, banking, IoT, supply chain, manufacturing and technology among its members. It aims to enable organizations to build robust, industry-specific applications, platforms and hardware systems to support their individual business transactions by creating enterprise-grade, open source distributed ledger frameworks and code bases.

"As a Premier member, we're hoping our expertise and global network will help advance open source distributed ledger technologies and allow us to better serve the complex needs of our clients, who look to us to improve their and their trade partners' financial endeavors," said Jon Pearson, Head of Deutsche Bank Labs United Kingdom and Ireland.