The Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures (CPMI) defines interoperability as follows:

“The technical or legal compatibility that enables a system or mechanism to be used in conjunction with other systems or mechanisms.”

When the Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) community talks about interoperability, they mean that two or more systems can work seamlessly with each other. What they are talking about is enabling cross-chain atomic swaps – swaps in which either both legs happen or neither of them do. Deriving from the Greek ‘atomos’, the word roughly translates to ‘indivisible’. It is indivisibility which ensures both legs of DLT-enabled financial transactions can be actioned,...

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...

Earlier this year, the Financial Stability Board authored a paper on stablecoins: 'Addressing the regulatory, supervisory and oversight challenges raised by 'global stablecoin' arrangements'.

Solving for on-chain payment in wholesale banking

'Stablecoins' are typically viewed as a proxy for money, so we do need to be careful about their use and the potential risks that they create. To this end, the FSB has authored a paper on stablecoins: "Addressing the regulatory, supervisory and oversight challenges raised by “global stablecoin” arrangements”.

Do we need to change thinking on value-date i.e. the date on which a transaction actually takes place? We’d love to hear your views.