Toyota Financial Services, the financial services subsidiary of the Toyota Motor Corporation, has joined banking consortium R3CEV, making it the first organization affiliated with a major automaker to take part in the cross-industry effort.
While Toyota Financial Services largely spoke in broad terms about its strategy, the company did indicate it could seek to leverage distributed ledger tech for non-financial use cases.
Chris Ballinger, CFO and global chief officer of Toyota USA, said in a statement:
“Beyond finance, we believe additional applications of the technology in auto manufacturing and sales will benefit our customers by making mobility more affordable and available.”
The company is expected to work alongside R3’s more than 40 other members as part of the R3 Lab and Research Centre, which creates and tests proofs-of-concept employing both distributed ledgers and blockchain technologies.