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sure they are well prepared for its new post-trade platform,
provided by blockchain technology vendor Digital Asset.
The exchange has held a number of conversations with
associations, working groups and individual custodians
about its new system, and how they will be able to use the
technology to create value differentiation between their
competitors.
“Client retention is obviously critical from a business
perspective. Any RFP process they go through to retain or
acquire a client is a massive piece of work and tends to be
cyclical. Creating value differentiation outside of price in a
this largely commoditised space has been hard, but now I
think there is an opportunity,” added Hogben.
Digital Asset is currently working with a number of ex-
changes and market infrastructures, as well as the ASX, in
promoting wide-spread adoption of the technology.
However, it too is in conversations with banks about how
they can use blockchain to not only reduce costs but launch
new services with it.
“What grows a business is when you can start to innovate
using these technologies and build revenue-generating
services,” said Chris Church, chief business development
officer, Digital Asset.
“Our belief is taking the Digital Asset platform and being
able to provide the software development tools we have
given to the ASX and their client base can help them build
applications independently.”
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Church added custody banks will soon begin to consol-
idate and converge all of the new technologies they are
bringing on, including artificial intelligence, cloud and
blockchain. The next evolution of blockchain will be to offer
a digital ledger in the cloud.
However, according to Hogben, custodians will have to
ensure these technologies are able work together so that
the data is produced in a standard format.
“Because we are adopting the ISO 20022 standard, and
the Digital Asset architecture relies on that standard in
creating creates business logic contracts, you have a stand-
ardised and structured data format that can be used more
effectively with these other new technologies. You need to
turn oil into petrol, and the oil is the data,” added Hogben.
“Currently in the custody world, a lot of data formats
are held in numerous silo databases that optimally should
be consolidated. They [custodians] see distributed ledger
technology as an opportunity in liberating the data to do
more with it.”
“Actually granting them
permission to see parts of
their database will create a
lot of benefits.”
TIM HOGBEN, COO, ASX
ASX commits to implement
DLT for the purpose of re-
placing CHESS
December 2017
Customer developement
and test environments to
commence from the second
quarter of 2019
2019
Industry-wide testing ex-
pected to begin in 2020, with
go-live slated for the first
quarter of 2021
2020 and beyond
Fall 2018
globalcustodian.com
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