SBI participating in R 3 Consortium

[ChazzReinhold]

A tweet from @Yoshitaka_kitao of SBI Group on the 13th of April 2018 read the following:

"Notice concerning participation in the block chain consortium led by United States R3 by the Russia Commercial Bank (SBI Holdings, SBI Bank)"

It then provides a link to the SBI website where the following notice is displayed (translated from Japanese)

SBI Bank LLC, a commercial bank in Russia (Board of Directors: Katsumi Hato, headquarters location: Moscow), a wholly owned subsidiary of SBI Holdings, Inc. (Head office: Minato-ku, Tokyo, President and CEO: Yoshitaka Kitao) , Hereafter "SBI Bank") announced today that it will participate in the Block Chain Consortium led by the FinTech company R 3 in the United States.

R 3 is a US startup company with strengths in block chain related technology (Distributed Ledger Technology), aimed at commercializing Corda which is a distributed ledger technology platform for recording and processing financial transactions We are promoting efforts. At the consortium led by R3, more than 200 leading financial institutions and other countries around the world are participating (as of April 12, 2018), financial institutions participating in the consortium have a syndicated loan of diversification ledger technology We are promoting the utilization of this technology for financial services, such as proceeding with demonstration experiments for utilization in trade finance.

SBI Bank aims to introduce new innovative financial services that utilize Corda in Russian market by participating in consortium of R3 company. As a pioneer of FinTech companies in Japan, the SBI Group has been developing various financial services businesses such as securities, banking, insurance, etc., utilizing the Internet since its foundation in 1999. Block chains are a technical field that is attracting particular attention in the FinTech field. We regard block chains as the core of FinTech innovation and are working on various measures both in Japan and abroad. Through this effort, we believe that we can contribute to the progress of the global block chain field.

My question is what does this mean in the bigger context and does anyone have any insights on this?