VIDEO | The rise of digital assets and processes hail unprecedented changes in the financial sector that can be aptly summed up by a quote from author and renowned business professor, Oren Harari: “the electric light did not come from the continuous improvement of candles”. Framing his presentation around this wisdom, Boon-Hiong Chan gave an outlook on what digitalisation will bring at the PostTrade 360° Stockholm conference earlier this year. Watch his full presentation below.

The session was sponsored by Deutsche Bank.

Digital assets represent a potential growth driver in securities, post trade, and the overall finance industry – as the Head of Fund Services and Head of Securities Market & Technology Advocacy at Deutsche Bank, Boon-Hiong Chan is at the heart of the movement. However, he believes that there is still a lot of work to do before we truly understand how to use the DLT paradigm to move away from the sequential legacy market structure to a more concurrent one.

Many obstacles remain in the way, including compliance costs, technology interoperability issues, and the requirement for new expertise. But “DLT has inspired process efficiency and there has been no effort spared in seeing how DLT can be leveraged internally, externally, and in post trade as well, to forge new efficiencies,” Boon-Hiong Chan says. “It’s not always a success, but every effort has been a lesson to bring the industry forward.”

Faster, safer, better

An example of success stories, he says, is Swift’s implementation of unique transaction identifiers (UTIs), which has shown how “concurrent information can facilitate better tracking of transactions in order to further processing efficiency”.

As for future developments, one that Boon-Hiong Chan thinks would make a significant impact is a more widespread use of “soulbound tokens” (SBT) in the fund servicing space. Currently, the same know-your-customer (KYC) processes tend to be repeated every time an investor subscribes to a new fund with a different asset manager. If investor adoption using SBTs could be performed once, and reused for asset managers serviced by the same trust anchor (TA), it would allow for more efficient on-chain permissioning, sanctions filtering, suitability checks, and information distribution.

Watch the session video here!

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• News around PostTrade 360° Stockholm 2023, on 29–30 March, is gathered here. This article is our final publication from that event.
• The conference info site, with detailed agenda, is here.
• For post-event access to recorded sessions, sign up here (where you can even log in easily by your LinkedIn account).
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