The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) and Accenture have introduced a distributed ledger technology (DLT) operating model to manage risks and consequences of an evolving DLT landscape.
The model, which was revealed in a whitepaper ‘Governing DLT Networks’, is set to ensure the safety and soundness of the network for the benefits of those involved and to better enable DLT to reach its full potential.
This includes a governing function to make decisions that will affect activity, connectivity, software changes, contractual agreements and transaction finality for participants across the entire network.
Other functions include participant lifecycle, runtime operations, data governance, third party management, platform management, infrastructure as well as legal and finance.
According to DTCC, the DLT-GM is a critical component of DTCC’s trade information warehouse initiative to migrate an existing central, industry-wide ledger for credit default swaps from a legacy mainframe database to a DLT platform leveraging the cloud.
Robert Palatnick, chief technology architect at DTCC, commented: “The financial services industry has seen unprecedented growth in data and processing power over the last 50 years.”
“DLT, with its built-in consistency, security and privacy, holds great promise to transform the digital landscape, but DLT’s full potential will only be realised with the implementation of a strong and transparent governing model.”
Wynn Davies, managing director, Accenture Capital Markets, added: “Working in collaboration with DTCC to lead this important work, Accenture has developed a governance model to manage the risks and consequences of a distributed ledger landscape, and we believe this governance paper is the beginning of a critical dialogue that needs to continue. Research, experimentation and learning about the challenges and potential for DLT-based governance processes will be essential as these platforms become more widely adopted.”
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