The issue of the environmental impact of blockchain systems is complex. Blockchain can be an energy-intensive technology – sometimes requiring a huge amount of processing power and consumption. At Fnality, we have adopted a specific mechanism for our network of payment systems, which minimises energy consumption by design to overcome the sustainability challenges often presented by distributed ledger technology (DLT) – while unlocking the many benefits that it offers.

In this blog, we explain the consensus mechanism adopted by Fnality and why this supports a key organisational goal of promoting sustainability and environmental stability.

Fnality is taking serious action to address unconscious bias and a major focus for this quarter has been to support the 2023 International Women's Day’s theme #EmbraceEquity.

In our two previous blog posts on stablecoins and CBDCs, we have discussed why the speed of market acceptance of stablecoins has constituted a financial stability concern for oversight authorities, pushing them to speed up their discussion around building appropriate legal frameworks to regulate new payment solutions.

We have also explored the acceleration of CBDC discussions in response to the perceived threat to existing currencies that central bankers see in stablecoins.

In the third and final blog post of this series, we highlight that several traditional market players have demonstrated their intention to explore and enter the stablecoin/DeFi space as a competitive response.

The amount...

In our most recent blog post, we explored why the speed of market acceptance of stablecoins has constituted a financial stability concern for oversight authorities, one that has sped up their thinking around the need for a legal framework to regulate novel payment solutions.

Central bankers have also begun to explore alternatives to stablecoins, one particularly notable example being Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC); a digital form of a country’s fiat currency, issued and regulated by the national central bank.

The financial authorities of around 90 countries worldwide - representing 90% of global GDP - are now exploring CBDC issuance and investigating the effect they may have on their...

As anticipated by our CEO, Rhom Ram, in his 2021 September blog post 'Are Stablecoins a threat to Capital Markets Incumbents?', the speed of market acceptance of stablecoins has been remarkably quick and therefore constitutes a financial stability concern for regulators.

As legislative frameworks are currently under construction, stablecoin arrangements - particularly because they depend on the receipt of fiat currency to issue corresponding digital tokens in exchange - look soon to be fully treated like depositary institutions.

Unlike a stablecoin, each Fnality Payment System doesn’t create or issue novel payment instruments, but is instead designed to be the 'system operator' of assets...

Digitisation and new technologies, like DLT and blockchain, are rapidly innovating the wholesale financial market industry.

Every day a new type of asset becomes ‘tokenised’ (i.e., represented digitally on a distributed ledger), from financial products (e.g., repurchase agreements, fixed income, equities) to any sort of tradable assets (e.g., real estate, IP royalties… forests!) shaping the future tokenised financial markets and potentially creating novel business cases whose magnitude is still hard to define.

At the same time, execution of transactions in existing markets, such as equities, fixed income, FX and derivatives have seen incredible digital automation.

However, post-trade...

Remote working has always been available to all Fnality’s employees, nevertheless, going to the office every day was still the “norm”.

Covid-19 has caught us all unprepared, but we’ve quickly learnt to stretch the boundaries of remote collaboration through our new Remote First ways of working. 

Overall, we have discovered that we are still able to perform & deliver – actually we have performed better than ever! The Fnality community that we had built, was still able to flourish despite the distance and this led us to feel more committed & close to each other. We’ve turned our daily interactions into virtual coffees, buddy catch-ups, end-of-the-week quizzes & games, mental health and...