Today the public DLT Hedera Hashgraph announced Singapore’s DBS Bank is the latest addition to its governing council. It’s the third bank and sixth financial services firm to join the 24 member council.
DBS Bank is very active in the blockchain sector. It started in trade finance partnering dltledgers but has also joined Contour, Trusple and others. Yesterday saw the launch of the pilot phase of Partior, the joint venture with JP Morgan and Temasek for interbank payments. Late last year, it launched the DBS Digital Exchange for digital assets and since has issued its own security token. And it’s also a founder of the carbon exchange that will use DLT, Climate Impact X (CIX), alongside SGX, Standard Chartered and Temasek.
“We have been leveraging emerging technologies to reshape the future of banking and have in recent months brought to market a number of innovative offerings powered by blockchain to help our clients seize opportunities in the new normal,” said Jimmy Ng, Group CIO and Head of Technology & Operations at DBS. “We look forward to joining our peers on the Hedera Governing Council in exploring further use cases that bring tangible benefits to our stakeholders.”
Other banks that are members of the Hedera governing council are South Africa’s Standard Bank and Korea’s Shinhan Bank. Shinhan’s activity preceded South Korea’s central bank digital currency (CBDC) simulation tender. And Shinhan also joined Korea’s Klaytn council, which like Hedera, is a public permissioned DLT. Subsequently, GroundX, a company associated with Klaytn blockchain, won the CBDC project. Both the Klaytn and Hedera networks are permissioned because governing council members control the nodes that write to the ledger.
Apart from Standard Bank and Shinhan Bank, other Hedera financial services members include Nomura Holdings, FIS (WorldPay), which is also on the Klaytn council, and Australia’s eftpos.
Hedera’s full list of governing council members is: Avery Dennison, Boeing, Chainlink Labs, DBS Bank, Dentons, Deutsche Telekom, DLA Piper, EDF (Électricité de France), eftpos, FIS (WorldPay), Google, IBM, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), LG Electronics, Magalu, Nomura Holdings, Shinhan Bank, Standard Bank Group, Swirlds, Tata Communications, University College London (UCL), Wipro, and Zain Group.