Sell-Side Technology Awards 2016: Best Overall Sell-Side Product of the Year — R3

In the past we've witnessed firms that many would consider outsiders upsetting the pecking order and upending incumbent market leaders, in addition to the judges "discovering" either new providers or new products that instinctively we've known will have long and fruitful lives in what is a mature and highly competitive marketplace. Past winners of this award include Numerix in 2013, GoldenSource's EDM Platform in 2014, and Quartet Financial Systems last year, thanks to its outstanding ActivePivot in-memory analytical platform.

This year, however, the big surprise is that the product of the year category has been awarded not to a product at all, but rather to a company: R3. This penultimate award, one of only two categories announced at the April 21 dinner held at the Marriott Marquis on Times Square, was, like the technology provider of the year category, decided by the four Waters journalists—John Brazier, Dan DeFrancesco, Anthony Malakian and Victor Anderson—who felt that given the absence of an out-and-out favorite, it was appropriate to bestow it on a firm active in a technology likely to have a significant bearing on an area of the capital markets primed for revolution: distributed-ledger technology. 

R3 is by no means the only technology firm with big plans in the distributed-ledger technology realm—just about everyone, it seems, has something to say about the technology and how it holds the key to revolutionizing the capital markets. The big hitters are certainly muscling-in on the action: In early April this year, WatersTechnology ran a story on Microsoft forming an alliance with R3 expressly to accelerate the use of distributed-ledger technologies among R3’s 43 member banks and the global financial markets in general. What better endorsement of one’s potential as a technology provider is there than the support of 43 capital markets firms and Microsoft? But as they say, talk is cheap, and the jury is still out in terms of the capital markets use-cases for this nascent technology. But if there is a firm leading the way and breaking new ground, it is R3. The firm’s CTO, Richard Gendal Brown, explained in an April 5 blog post, that it and its member banks have been working for the past six months on R3Corda, a distributed-ledger platform specifically, he says, “designed to manage financial agreements between regulated financial institutions.”

R3 is clearly going places and it won’t be long before we start seeing the fruits of its appreciable labor. For many industry observers, however, those fruits can’t ripen fast enough. 

R3 is clearly going places and it won’t be long before we start seeing the fruits of its appreciable labor. For many industry observers, however, those fruits can’t ripen fast enough.