Menu
Banking Exchange Magazine Logo
Menu

Microsoft, bank group team up for blockchain

Partnership involves dedicated vendor staff

  • |
  • Written by  Website Staff
 
 
Microsoft announced its blockchain deal with R3, an international bank consortium, in a short video. You can view the video through a link in this article. Microsoft announced its blockchain deal with R3, an international bank consortium, in a short video. You can view the video through a link in this article.

Microsoft Corp. and the R3 Consortium of banks have announced a strategic partnership to hasten the use of distributed ledger technologies—“the blockchain”—among the consortium’s members and global financial markets.

The announcement came earlier this week during Microsoft’s Envision conference in New Orleans. The effort will expand on R3’s experimentation with Microsoft’s Azure cloud service, which offers “BaaS”—blockchain as a service. Azure offers an “ecosystem” of BaaS partners.

R3 is a financial technology innovation company operating in New York, London, and San Francisco, that partners with over 40 large international banks on technology experiments. In early March R3 announced that the consortium member network had held successful trials of simulated trading of fixed-income assets among themselves using five different blockchain technologies. These were provided by Chain, Eris Industries, Ethereum, IBM, and Intel.

Besides announcing the strategic partnership, Microsoft and R3 announced that Microsoft would be the research firm’s preferred cloud services provider.

Overall the deal calls for Microsoft to provide cloud-based tools, services, and infrastructure to R3’s labs around the world, as well as dedicated staffers.

“R3’s global labs will drive faster experimentation, provide technical agility, and accelerate learning as the financial services industry moves towards validated and certified distributed ledger technology implementations,” the companies said in a press statement.

View Microsoft video about R3 deal

back to top

Sections

About Us

Connect With Us

Resources

Webinar: How Banks and Fintechs Are Building the New Payments Stack

Tuesday, June 30, 2026, 1:00 PM ET

As digital assets move into the mainstream, banks, fintechs, and payment providers are focused on a new challenge: how to build and scale products that deliver real business value.

In this session, Cross River and Fireblocks will explore how leading organizations are bringing digital asset products to market, the infrastructure decisions that shape growth and speed-to-market, and the lessons learned from teams building at scale today. From wallet architecture and custody models to vendor strategy and regulatory considerations, we'll discuss the foundational choices that can accelerate innovation — or create friction down the road.

Whether you're evaluating a new offering or scaling an existing program, you'll leave with a practical framework for understanding how digital asset infrastructure impacts business outcomes.

REGISTER NOW!