A groundbreaking proof-of-concept initiative led by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) and involving major financial services firms and top financial technology providers has shown the “potential advantages of implementing a shared ledger system” for post-trade operations that could spur “innovation in securities settlement processes” via improved operational efficiency, real-time liquidity access, and… Read More >>
CFTC Mulls Ops Changes for Non-Cash Collateral
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is mulling recommendations that would not need to become rules but would lead to operational changes governing the use of non-cash collateral for margin requirements and might pave the way for more clarity in the regulation of digital assets for U.S. markets. The CFTC permits using non-cash assets as… Read More >>
Disruptive IT Takes Aim at Corporate Actions’ Problems
Corporate action processing, including problematic data issues, is interacting with disruptive technologies, and that might be good for the securities industry. A recently launched pilot shows how artificial intelligence (A.I.), blockchains, and other cutting-edge technologies may lead to a breakthrough. Chainlink, an Ethereum-based provider of decentralized “oracle” networks, is leading the pilot. Oracles are key… Read More >>
DLT Move Will Be Harder Than T+1: DTCC
A wholesale move to distributed ledger technology (DLT) for the securities industry would be “a massive undertaking” that would be far more difficult than the move to shorter T+1 settlement, says Nadine Chakar, managing director and global head of DTCC Digital Assets. Chakar also pointed out that the DTCC as a financial market infrastructure (FMI)… Read More >>
iCapital Embraces DLT for New Fund
iCapital, which offers an alternative investment platform, has launched its first fund that exploits distributed ledger technology (DLT) to save clients “thousands of hours of manual data reconciliation and version sharing,” and promises to cut costs, boost productivity, and reduce the risks of manual data entry. Using DLT to ease these pain points is intended… Read More >>
Wall Street Resists Full Embrace of DLT: Report
Blockchains based upon distributed ledger technology (DLT) have the capacity to undo the “complexity, opacity and fragmentation of capital markets,” but they lack a clear path to wider acceptance, are competing against other disruptive technologies for funding, and represent a threat to traditional industry institutions, according to a new report from World Economic Forum (WEF)…. Read More >>
SWIFT’s DLT Sandbox to Help Securities Solutions Too
The SWIFT cooperative for financial messaging systems recently announced that it is exploring how distributed ledger technology (DLT)/blockchain can help its global payments system. Upon further digging, I found out that the “underlying DLT sandbox” will be helpful in testing other proof-of-concepts (PoCs) such as one to come for securities processing. To quickly recap, SWIFT… Read More >>
