Raiffeisen Bank International (RBI) has joined the blockchain consortium led by enterprise software firm R3, becoming the first Austrian bank to join the initiative.

R3’s global network counts over 160 banks, financial services firms, technology companies, central banks, regulators, and trade associations. It also works with a number of central banks and regulators around the world.

Joining the consortium is in line with RBI Group’s digitization strategy. According to the official release, in its work with R3, RBI will focus on cash and payment services, capital markets, digital identity, securities services and trade finance.

“By joining R3 we will be able to exchange and collaborate with peers, which will substantially boost the speed, security and usability of our own blockchain innovations. The usage of technology platforms such as ‘Corda’ allows us to gain extensive know-how in the underlying infrastructure of future commercial blockchain applications,” explains Michael Hoellerer, Plenipotentiary of RBI.

R3 offers access to “Corda” an enterprise-grade distributed ledger platform for finance and commerce, working with its members to develop PoCs and move distributed ledger applications into commercial deployment. Last month, version 1.0 of the Corda platform was launched.