Crédit Agricole CIB participated in the private fundraising of SETL. This is the Bank’s first equity investment in a fintech.

SETL was launched in July 2015 to deploy a multi-asset, multi-currency institutional payment and settlements infrastructure based on blockchain technology. The SETL system enables market participants to move cash and assets directly between each other, facilitating the immediate and final settlement of market transactions.

The SETL system maintains a permissioned distributed ledger of ownership and transaction records, simplifying the process of matching, settlement, custody, registration and transaction reporting.

François Marion, Deputy CEO of Crédit Agricole CIB, said: “We are delighted to accompany SETL in its development by participating in this fundraising. SETL has developed a private blockchain that already integrates the specific matters of the banking industry. This minority stake is fully in line with the open innovation strategy of Crédit Agricole CIB and more broadly the Crédit Agricole Group strategy. It paves the way for an industrial partnership that will contribute to the work already undertaken by Crédit Agricole CIB on the blockchain technology over the last 2 years and will enable Crédit Agricole CIB to speed up the digitalization of its processes and exchanges with its customers.”

Source: Crédit Agricole

Peter Randall, CEO of SETL, added: “We are pleased to announce that we have extended our shareholder register and have agreed the scope of a number of revenue generating projects. With the recent announcement of the implementation of our OpenCSD product, the completion of further funding arrangements, I am excited about our prospects We are unique in having both a financial grade block-chain product and a proven deployment route. SETL has successfully deployed multiple environments capable of processing in excess of 80,000 transactions per second across over 100 million accounts concurrently in a globally distributed configuration. As a result of this technological capacity SETL have already received significant further indications of interest in our OpenCSD product. SETL continues to develop market infrastructures, like IZNES, which now has over 20 major European fund managers and will be the largest global blockchain by both value and volume.”