Our free FinTech roundup also covers news from the Canadian Pension Plan & CRD, CFTC & the South African Reserve Bank, and ZUBR & ClearLoop.
ASX Stakeholders Ask for More Time
The Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) reports that it has set April 2023 as the new launch date for its blockchain-based replacement for the incumbent Clearing House Electronic Subregister System (CHESS), citing the need for more time to refine the platform to come.
The new launch date follows a tentative new launch of April 2022 announced over the summer. That data was subject to review by those organizations that work with the ASX. The move from a launch is 2021 to 2022 was the result of the complications caused by the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown.
“This follows careful consideration of the feedback from the 100 organizations that participated in the extensive industry consultation, engagement with regulatory agencies, detailed discussions with our technology partners, and completion of a comprehensive project review,” ASX officials say in a prepared statement. “While most CHESS users indicated they could meet the proposed go-live date of April 2022, many asked for extra industry testing, more time to prepare for the new system, and additional functionality that reduces manual processes (such as electronic corporate action elections) to be delivered as soon as possible.”
ASX stakeholders and officials report that they are still feeling the impacts of the global COVID-19 outbreak.
“This includes the effect on collaboration and productivity, the importance of digitizing processes and the need to further reduce cutover risk to the new CHESS system,” ASX officials say. “The industry also requested substantially more post-trade processing capacity than what had been contemplated pre-COVID-19. This is in response to the extreme increases in trading volumes on the ASX platform during the most volatile period of the pandemic in March 2020.”
“ASX has listened to the industry, regulators, and its technology partners throughout this project. It is clear that COVID-19 continues to impact the whole industry, including ASX, and this has evolved what our stakeholders want from the CHESS replacement system,” says Dominic Stevens, ASX CEO, in a statement.
Canadian Pension Plan Picks CRD Platform
Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments) has picked the cloud-based Charles River Investment Management Solution (Charles River IMS) from Charles River Development (CRD) to consolidate investment processes across asset classes on a single platform.
CPP Investments will use the platform to manage portfolios “across all publicly traded asset classes including equities, fixed income, and derivatives,” officials say. CPP Investments oversees CAD 434.4 billion in assets on behalf of more than 20 million beneficiaries.
CPP Investments will also apply Charles River IMS to “to improve the operational risk exposure management.”
“Our initiative is designed to ensure that our operating model and business processes can continue to support our investment strategy as products grow in complexity and markets become more fragmented,” says Poul Winslow, senior managing director and global head of capital markets and factor investing, CPP Investments, in a prepared statement.
The Charles River IMS platform will help the firm “scale up to meet expected future growth and diversity in asset classes,” says Kelly Shen, senior managing director and chief technology and data officer for CPP Investments, in a statement. “Achieving a high degree of straight-through processing throughout the investment end-to-end lifecycle, will simplify our application landscape, and increase agility in portfolio management,” Shen says.
CRD is part of State Street Corp.
CFTC & South African Reserve Bank Sign Cooperative Effort
The CFTC and the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) have signed a statement of intent to “cooperate and support innovation through each authority’s respective financial technology (fintech) initiative — CFTC’s LabCFTC and SARB’s Fintech Unit,” officials report.
The statement of intent will facilitate “cooperation and the exchange of information on financial technology innovation” and information sharing about fintech market trends and developments, officials say.
“It is also designed to facilitate referrals of fintech businesses, and the sharing of information and insights derived from each authority’s experiences and relevant events, proofs of concept, trials, or innovation competitions. The arrangement will support both authorities’ efforts to facilitate market-enhancing fintech innovation and ensure international cooperation on emerging regulatory best practices,” officials say.
“This arrangement builds on recent efforts by the CFTC to strengthen international collaboration in this realm,” says Heath P. Tarbert, chairman of CFTC, in a prepared statement. He was referring to the agency’s 2018 arrangements with authorities in the United Kingdom, Singapore, and Australia, and the CFTC joining of the Global Financial Innovation Network last year, officials add.
LabCFTC serves CFTC’s goal of encouraging innovation and enhancing the regulatory experience for market participants at home and abroad, officials say. The SARB Fintech Unit was established in 2017 to help SARB’s efforts to embrace fintech innovation.
ZUBR Platform to Work with Copper’s ClearLoop
ZUBR, a Moscow-based cryptocurrency derivatives platform, reports that it has fully integrated the ClearLoop settlement tool from London-based digital currency custodian, Copper, which will allow clients to settle digital currency transactions off-exchange within milliseconds, officials say.
The integration of ClearLoop with ZUBR was stress-tested by Exact Pro, a specialist firm for quality assurance of exchanges, officials say. The integration is intended to provide a layer of security for institutional and other traders that want to move their holdings from crypto exchanges to secure custodian services or cold wallets.
The ClearLoop system “instantly settles fiat and crypto trades between the parties. ClearLoop also enables traders to move assets on to the ZUBR almost instantly, a huge benefit to traders employing high-frequency arbitrage strategies. This will allow ZUBR’s clients to react faster and optimize their use of capital,” officials say. “ZUBR joins other exchanges such as Deribit, AAX, Bitfinex, CoinPass, Diversifi and Xena which have also integrated Copper’s CleapLoop.”
ZUBR is a crypto derivatives platform launched in March 2020, officials say. ZUBR received an in-principle approval for its DLT Provider license (Gibraltar) in May 2020.
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