The Weekend Read: March 26

by Todd McDonald

When they say ‘Blockchain’ just close your eyes and think ‘DLT DLT DLT’…

First up, some Corda love. This Australian Financial Review article (paywalled) highlights how our bank partner CBA used Corda in collaboration with their customer, Colonial First State, and a delivery partner, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, to show how it could help solve a key business problem of capital costs:

Colonial First State is re-engineering the process of buying units in the $2.2 trillion market for managed funds in a move it says will “dramatically” reduce the amount of capital banks will have to hold against wealth operations. A recent experiment with Commonwealth Bank of Australia’s emerging technology team and Hewlett Packard Enterprise using the R3 consortium’s Corda ‘distributed ledger’ allowed Colonial to eliminate arduous paper application process for managed funds and the three-day wait for the delivery of units.

Corda, which is being developed by a consortium of global banks, can remove counter-party risk for intermediaries like CFS by allowing assets to be exchanged and transactions settled instantaneously. It also provides transparency on what each counter-party holds across geographies. By removing the risk of the issuer defaulting or the investor failing to settle, banks will be able to reduce the amount of regulatory capital required to provide cover for those risks.

“If [a blockchain] was adopted locally, regionally or globally, the capital the industry would need to hold could reduce dramatically,” CBA’s group executive for wealth management, Annabel Spring, told the APAC blockchain conference in Sydney last week.

CBA is confident about Corda’s security protocols, which have been designed with input by dozens of banks around the globe. In the CFS trial, the units were transferred cryptographically with keys in the form of PIN numbers required to access the system through mobile apps.

We also got a nice shout out by our friend Michael Dowling of IBM with this in depth post on the evolution of Corda, along with some reference to the recent blockchain-not-blockchain kerfuffle. And since we have been, ahem, a few weeks between posts, here are some ‘catch up’ blockchain-y links:

• Indian bank panel: ‘Blockchain becomes effective when more players are involved’
• Alibaba and AusPost team up to tackle food fraud with blockchain
• Couple above article with the always informative and entertaining Dave Birch with The blockchain’s salad days
• HBR: The Blockchain Will Do to the Financial System What the Internet Did to Media
• Google also on the ‘blockchain-inspired’ corner: Trust, confidence and Verifiable Data Audit and Google DeepMind’s Untrendy Play to Make the Blockchain Actually Useful (ouch!)
• A bunch of Bitcoin links on forks, etc etc etc
• BBG: Sending Money Overseas to Get Faster Once Banks Pick a Winner

And finally, a big congrats to ATB Financial as our newest Canadian member!

RegTech (cont.)

R3 was happy to announce another member recently, as we welcomed the State of Illinois to our growing list of Regulator Members. Read about this here and here, along with their overall plans to leverage DLT. Our CEO David Rutter and R3 world traveller Isabelle Corbett followed up with this conversation with CoinDesk that lays out some of the concepts behind the R3 ‘RegNet’.

The efforts and interest of regulators extends across the US, both at the State (see Delaware is Drafting Law That Would Recognize Blockchain Records) and Federal level; Acting (and now Nominated) Chairman of the CFTC J. Christopher Giancarlo recently gave a speech on his overall agenda. Of note was the section dedicated to FinTech, both due to its substance and to the fact that the Chairman gave the topic proper airtime even with his quite package agenda. Full text is here, quick pull quote below:

[M]arket regulation by the CFTC has not kept pace. In too many ways, it remains an analog regulator of an increasingly digital marketplace, curtailing its effectiveness in overseeing the safety and soundness of markets. But it doesn’t have to be this way, especially in an industry that is synonymous with innovation. The CFTC must be a leader in adopting the “do no harm” approach to financial technology similar to the US approach to the early Internet. We must cultivate a regulatory culture of forward thinking.

Couple the above with this post from ISDA on the ‘past and future’ of ISDA agreements, particularly on the role of Master Agreements in the world of smart contracts. As a reminder, our third Smart Contract Template Summit (suggestions for a new name welcome!) will be coming up this June.

MAS continues to push an aggressive fintech agenda of their own. A few weeks back, MAS announced the successful completion of the interbank payments projects that they executed with R3 and a collection of local banks. See here and here. And this past week they announced more details on their plan to roll out a national KYC utility.

Another organization at the intersection of regulation, infrastructure and fintech is CLS. This IBTimes articlegives an interesting look at some of their thinking. The article also lays out the differences between ledger approaches, namely that of IBM’s Fabric vs R3’s Corda.

Get the Papers Get the Papers

Our Research team and amazing collaborators have been busy recently, with three new papers:

1. R3’s Survey of Confidentiality and Privacy Techniques, with an accompanying piece in American Banker
2. R3’s Report on Fedcoin with JP Koning
3. R3’s Bridging the Gap Between Investment Banking Architecture and Distributed Ledgers by my good friend Martin Walker

Others have been busy as well. BIS recently release The Quest for Speed in Payments (summary article here), while G20 Insights released The G20 Countries Should Engage with Blockchain Technologies to Build an Inclusive, Transparent, and Accountable Digital Economy for All