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NEWS
FirstRand ties up £1.1bn deal with Aldermore
F
irst Rand has reached an agreement with UK bank Aldermore which will see it acquire the challenger in a deal worth £1.1 billion.
The South African bank has offered 313p per share for Aldermore, a 22% premium on the firm’s closing share price. The offer is being put to shareholders, but Aldermore’s board are said to be recommending the deal highly.
Aldermore, which the BBC describes in its report on the story as one of the UK’s “best known” challenger banks, has 230,000 customers. Less than half that of newer challenger Monzo and a quarter of successful neobank Metro Bank.
FirstRand has said that it plans to expand the range of services which Aldermore offers. New channels include car insurance and finance.
Chief executive of Aldermore, Phillip Monks, said that the challenger’s mission would remain unchanged: “Our vision has always been to bring more competition to UK banking, and the support of the FirstRand Group will enable us to continue to do just that.”
SIA and R3 join forces to simplify blockchain adoption
S
IA and R3 have launched a strategic partnership to speed up the global development and adoption of blockchain applications by leveraging SIA net’s 600 nodes provided to financial institutions, corporates and public administrations.
As part of the partnership, a secure and protected network called SIAchain will be built. This will be integrated with R3’s Corda platform to enable SIA customers to run CordDapps – applications designed specifically to meet the needs of institutions across the banking and finance sector. The first CorDapps on SIAchain will be available from the first quarter of 2018.
The main goal is to allow the use of CorDapps through the SIAchain infrastructure, which guarantees their full availability and use, ensuring a standardised operating context, to registered members of specific communities. Banks, companies and public administrations have an ever-increasing need to cooperate efficiently in the management of complex processes, reducing times, costs and operating risks.
Corda is an open source, blockchain-inspired distributed ledger technology (DLT) platform that enables institutions to transact
directly using smart contracts while ensuring the highest levels of privacy and security. It is the outcome of over two years of intense research and development by R3 and its 100+ members. Applications on Corda use common code and protocols to ensure interoperability.
“The collaboration with the R3 consortium is a milestone in our blockchain strategy. We will integrate on SIAchain, which rests on roughly 600 nodes of the SIAnet network throughout Europe, the most advanced technologies available and we will develop innovative applications for financial institutions, corporates and public sector” said Massimo Arrighetti, CEO of SIA.
“We designed Corda as an open source platform specifically to encourage partnerships such as this. Working with our partners we are growing a diverse ecosystem of interoperable applications on the platform, each providing a unique solution to the challenges faced by financial market participants.
In addition, leveraging connectivity to existing networks such as SIA’s helps speed up adoption and implementation of DLT across global financial markets”, said David E. Rutter, CEO of R3.
www.ibsintelligence.com | © IBS Intelligence 2017
Olga DeLawrence @ Unsplash
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