Publicly traded Russian Payments service provider Qiwi (NASDAQ: QIWI) has joined the R3 Blockchain consortium to collaborate on the design and application of the technology to the financial markets. QIWI is the first company from Russia to join R3's global network of over sixty major banks and institutions developing distributed and shared-ledger inspired solutions.
David Rutter, CEO, R3
David Rutter, CEO of R3, commented: “The addition of QIWI is a further milestone for R3. Eastern Europe is a key region for us as we expand our network of consortium members and continue to develop truly global applications for this groundbreaking technology.”
“QIWI is thoroughly involved in developing and testing blockchain projects and ideas that can be directly applied to its core payment market. We believe that blockchain projects that we are currently working on can be applied on one of the R3 platforms and have great potential to be favorably perceived by regulated financial institutions,” said Sergey Solonin, QIWI's chief executive officer.
“QIWI is working closely with national regulators and domestic financial institutions in order to familiarize the market with these technologies. At the moment, we are at the stage of international integration. The capabilities of distributed and shared-ledger inspired technologies are very exciting for us and can help us upgrade and improve the technologies underlying our core business. Our goal with R3 is to explore this emerging technology space as we shape the future of payments and transactions throughout collaborative research with other members of the consortium.”
