One of China’s largest financial firms, Ping An Insurance Company of China, has joined the R3CEV blockchain consortium. Based in Shenzhen, the Chinese financial giant is the 12th largest financial services company in the world, with annual revenues for 2015 coming in at 619.99 billion Yuan.

According to LeapRate, Ping An is the largest publicly traded financials services firm in China and has assets valued at more than $765 billion. While Ping An Group focuses primarily on the banking and insurance industries, the company also has investments in the Forex industry. In December of 2014, Ping An, along with Sberbank, invested $27 million into online foreign currency trading platform eToro.

Ping An is the first Chinese company to join R3’s international roster of firms looking to explore the potential of blockchains and distributed ledgers. More recently, Brazilian bank Itaú Unibanco

Blockchain technology is currently being explored by almost every major financial institution in the world and Jessica Tan, COO of Ping An Group, explained that the company decided to join R3 in order to help drive innovation in the financial services industry:

“Ping An Group has always been at the forefront of using technology and innovation in its banking, insurance, investment and internet businesses. We are excited about joining R3 and look forward to developing and using blockchain technology to create a more efficient way of managing financial assets digitally end-to-end.”

David Rutter, Founder and CEO of R3CEV, framed the inclusion of Ping An as “another important milestone” in the growth of the organization, “We look forward to collaborating with them in our lab to develop the next generation in financial services technology.” adds Rutter.

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