Foreign exchange settlement firm CLS has teamed up with IBM and nine financial institutions, including Barclays and Citi, to begin testing a platform that provides the financial services industry with a way to access blockchain-based applications.

The distributed ledger technology platform, called LedgerConnect, is designed to give banks, buy and sell side firms, fintechs, and software vendors a way to deploy, share, and consume services hosted on a blockchain network.

“LedgerConnect is part of CLSs strategy to explore how we can provide safe and robust solutions that create efficiencies and reduce risk for a diverse range of firms operating in the financial markets,” said Alan Marquard, chief strategy and development officer at CLS. “We expect LedgerConnect to deliver enhanced efficiencies and economies of scale over single-purpose distributed ledger networks.”

According to the companies, LedgerConnect will provide financial institutions with access to services such as know your customer processes, sanctions screening, collateral management, derivatives post-trade processing and reconciliation, and market data.

Services selected for the proof of concept come from vendors including Baton Systems, Calypso, Copp Clark, IBM, Mphasis, OpenRisk, SynSwap, and Persistent Systems.

Following the test, should it be successful and receive necessary regulatory approvals, CLS and IBM plan to make LedgerConnect widely available to the industry.