It gets technical, but it needs to be solved. In a future where blockchain-based assets or tokens – or money – could trade places with less friction, the precise working of the risk-free delivery-versus-payment mechanism must be clear. An Optic conference panel looked into it.

“It is easy to say that it will bring lower cost or lower risk. But how is that quantified to the front office?”

The comment by Angus Fletcher, CEO of DLT-based wholesale payments enabler Fnality UK, put the finger on one of the dilemmas around atomic settlement – the mechanism to ensure that the exchange of assets versus money in a trade happens simultaneously in both directions if at all. In today’s finance, this is usually guaranteed by a central securities depository; with distributed ledger technology it could in principle be guaranteed by the technology as such.

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AFME’s Coco Chen, Associate Director, Technology & Operations, moderated the talk with panellists …
Angus Fletcher, CEO, Fnality UK,
David Durouchoux, Deputy CEO Business Development, Societe Generale – Forge,
Keith Bear, Fellow, Centre for Alternative Finance, University of Cambridge, and
Paolo Bramini, Payment Systems Directorate, Banca D’Italia.

Atomic settlement could be instantaneous, but could also be scheduled for any later point where market participants prefer to avoid the need for pre-funding and asset pre-allocation that it would introduce versus today’s standard settlement cycles of T+2 as in Europe or T+1 as in America. It could offer technically simple access to funding, and a possibility to settle outside traditional opening hours of real-time gross settlement (RTGS) systems.

The session was introduced with a short theoretical primer by Keith Bear, and a description by Paolo Bramini of three different pilot-stage candidates for technical solutions to the atomic settlement:
– the Trigger solution by Deutsche Bundesbank,
– the TIPS Hash Link by Banca D’Italia, and
– the Full-DLT Interoperability solution by Banque de France.


The yearly Optic conference, in London on 2–3 October 2024, is hosted by the Association for Financial Markets in Europe (AFME). Optic stands for the “Operations, post trade, technology and innovation conference”. PostTrade 360° is there, with our coverage collected here.