Officials at Prometheum Inc., a market infrastructure provider for blockchain-native securities, report that they have registered Prometheum Coinery LLC as a digital transfer agent with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and acquired ProFinancial Inc., an SEC-registered and FINRA-member broker-dealer. These actions make Prometheum “one of the only platforms to offer end-to-end lifecycle support… Read More >>
BNY Invests in EquiLend & Will Use ‘1Source’
The Bank of New York Mellon Corp. has made an undisclosed minority investment in EquiLend, a technology, data, and analytics solutions provider for the securities finance industry, and BNY along with eight other financial institutions making strategic investments will advise EquiLend on further innovation and efficiency in securities finance transactions. BNY will also be among… Read More >>
Duo Launches Digital Contracts Solution for Market Data
Broadhead Technologies and Crown Jewel Consultants (CJC) have combined forces and are officially launching a digital contracts solution for market data — Digital Rights for Data Management (DRDM) — based on distributed ledger technology (DLT) that its backers say could change how financial services firms and market data providers manage digital rights and data usage… Read More >>
Can Tokenization Save Asset Managers $135 Billion?
Tokenization is “the process of transforming asset ownership into digital tokens on a blockchain,” and it could also be one of the fastest ways for the asset management industry to save $135 billion by trimming the costs associated with traditional fund accounting, transfer agencies, compliance monitoring, and regulatory reporting. This is according to the recently… Read More >>
South African Company Readies DLT-Based Transaction Platform
(FinSwitch, a provider based in Cape Town, South Africa, that offers securities transaction flow support is readying a messaging and transaction platform based on distributed ledger technology (DLT). Dubbed FinChain, the new system will replace its legacy offering that FinSwitch says offers “a common automated platform to process transactions, fund prices, and other data between… Read More >>
SIFMA’s DLT Experiment Could Overhaul Ops
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 >>
