Lition and Volks- and Raiffeisenbank (VR-Bank) cooperate to process a €20 million syndicated loan on the Lition blockchain co-innovated with SAP
Lition, the company behind the scalable public-private enterprise blockchain with deletable data features, is working together with two cooperatives of the German VR Bank on a blockchain application. The pilot project is a €20 million syndicated loan between two VR Bank cooperatives and a real estate development company, for which these parties have now signed a contract with the blockchain developer Lition.
The announcement marks a big step forward in the industry, as institutional involvement across blockchain begins to ramp up and significant players enter the market. The traditional way of managing syndicated loans involves many manual steps, middleman and cumbersome systems. Through blockchain, parties can apply, align on and trustfully approve loans using advanced private-key based encryption. This increases speed, accessibility and user-friendliness for both loan applicants and the various banks backing the loan.
Given the fact that loans typically contain sensitive information like income, keeping data private is crucial. Also, at the end of the loan, the data needs to be securely and legally deleted so customers can rest assured their data will never be distributed, and the bank adheres to data protection laws, especially in Europe with the GDPR ruling. While typical blockchain solutions cannot provide these features, it is a good fit with Lition’s own technology that was designed specifically for commercial, data-sensitive use cases.
Lition’s CEO, Dr. Richard Lohwasser commented “Lition’s blockchain was built with commercial use cases in mind, and we’re thrilled that we can now bring benefits to customers not just in the already existing energy sector, but also to finance. A €20 million loan with a real estate company is a very solid starting point. From this starting point, we can further commercialize the technology into additional securities such as corporate bonds or tokenized equity”.
About VR-Bank
The Volks- und Raiffeisenbank (VR-Bank) is a German co-operative banking group that together has 11.000 branches, 915 cooperatives, assets of € 891 billion and 18.5 million customers as of 2017. The Cooperative Financial Network consists of well-known German mortgage banks, Bausparkasse Schwäbisch Hall, R+V Versicherung, Union Investment, VR Smart Finanz (formerly VR Leasing), TeamBank, and DZ PRIVATBANK. In 2017, the Cooperative Financial Network’s net interest income was €18.6 billion. The consolidated net profit before taxes was €8.9 billion, an increase of 7.3 percent and its equity is calculated at €104.4 billion.
About Lition
About Lition Technology AG — Lition is a blockchain infrastructure and dApp developer, with 20 employees mostly based in Berlin. Lition’s new blockchain infrastructure which is co-innovated with SAP the world leading business software company addresses key commercial and business issues that have prevented blockchain networks from reaching widespread mainstream adoption so far. With scalable public-private blockchain and ‘deletable’ data features, the Lition network allows businesses and large enterprises to bring innovative blockchain applications to the mass-market that are legally compliant.
