Fnality International started its life as a pure research project to better understand how DLT could change financial markets. In time, the project grew to include a consortium of financial institutions who wished to explore how Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) could use tokenised cash assets to settle securities trades. In so doing it sought to alleviate many of the FMI challenges.
The initiative became known as the Utility Settlement Coin (USC) Project, with a core objective; the creation of a peer-to-peer digital cash asset to settle tokenised transactions with finality.
The payment solution needed to be:
- Available in multiple currencies to allow for greater efficiencies in managing fragmented liquidity.
- Capable of inter-operating across multiple business platforms, whether to support PvP or DvP settlement of financial transactions.
- A digital representation of money held in a central bank account to ensure banks could rely upon its value as they would fiat currency.
Having established that these aims were both theoretically and technically possible, the consortium members took a step toward building the system, to enable ‘on-chain’ payment, by investing in the creation of Fnality International (Fnality).
Fnality now boasts 17 major institutions as shareholders: Banco Santander, BNY Mellon, Barclays, CIBC, Commerzbank, Credit Suisse, Euroclear, ING, KBC Group, Lloyds Banking Group, Mizuho Financial Group, MUFG Bank, Nasdaq, Nomura, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, State Street Corporation, and UBS.
