Blockchain specialists SETL and Cobalt DL have paired up to deploy SETL’s Open CSD product in the Cobalt FX post-trade platform.
Cobalt DL is a private peer-to-peer network that uses distributed ledger technology to reduce post-trade risk, and costs, in the financial markets.
The SETL OpenCSD distributed ledger will provide a depository of foreign exchange trade information captured in the Cobalt reconciliation system, offering cryptographic confirmations of trades and proof of agreements to the terms of the trades.
Creating a shared view of foreign exchange trade data is intended to free up back- and middle-office resources, remove several layers of reconciliation processes and reducing the costs associated with legacy infrastructure.
Participants will be able to retrieve and verify details of their own trading activity, while the activities of other participants will remain private.
The new capability will be available in 2017, and 15 institutional FX participants have already committed to using the service.
Andy Coyne, co-founder of Cobalt DL, said: “The FX market requires systems to be able to achieve burst throughputs of over 20,000 transactions per second with daily capacity in the millions. SETL were able to demonstrate working technology processing at these speeds and in excess of 1.4 billion transactions a day—an absolute necessity in the high volume FX market.”
“The SETL OpenCSD platform provides a real-world interface and application programming interface structure that will allow us to fully integrate it into our solution.”
Peter Randall, CEO of SETL, said: “The Cobalt team are leaders in the field of FX processing and our common focus on speed and resiliency makes us natural partners.”
“This is not a proof-of-concept or a prototype; we expect it to be a revenue generating implementation of distributed ledger technology.”
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