Broadridge Financial Solutions has gone live with its distributed ledger repo (DLR) platform that builds on the success of multiple pilots with sell-side and buy-side firms.
The firm and its users have realized significant and immediate benefits of reduced risk, operational costs, and enhanced liquidity, while also accelerating their digitization journey.
DLR provides a single platform where market participants can agree, execute and settle repo transactions. It allows for the immobilization of the underlying securities in the repo transactions, while transferring ownership via smart contracts executed on the platform.
The platform’s functionality significantly reduces the operating cost and risk of all repo activity, including intraday, overnight and term repos, both on a bilateral and an intracompany basis and also reduces counterparty risk while increasing auditability. In the first week since launch, DLR has executed $31B in average daily volume.
Vijay Mayadas, President of Capital Markets at Broadridge, said: “This is the first step in the transformation of the $10T global bilateral repo market using smart contracts and distributed ledger technology. Co-innovating with market participants, we are able to bring solutions to our network of clients that create the next level of operational efficiencies.
“Within the repo market, distributed ledger technology and smart contracts have shown that they can play an instrumental role in driving efficiencies, reducing risk and enhancing liquidity while leveraging the existing legal and account frameworks.”
DLR utilizes Daml smart contracts from Digital Asset as well as VMware Blockchain, a highly scalable distributed ledger platform. DLR reduces operational risk and settlement cost for repurchase, or repo, agreements by providing a secure record of repo trade details, reducing the need for reconciliation and removing obstacles to straight-through-processing.
Vinod Jain, Senior Analyst, Aite Group, said: “By coupling emerging technologies like distributed ledger technology and smart contracts with existing operational account structure functionality, Broadridge has enabled real-time securities mobility in the repo market.”
Broadridge has recently enhanced its Private Market Hub with blockchain technology from AWS. The many challenges faced by private market participants, such as disconnected communication and back-office reconciliation, were solved by the newest version of the platform using distributed ledger.
Broadridge Financial Solutions has appointed Ian Strudwick as General Manager and Head of Asia-Pacific (APAC), based in Singapore and reporting to Broadridge International President Samir Pandiri, the firm announced.
The industry veteran has 23 years of experience in the sector, including 16 years in leadership roles for global and regional teams across capital markets, trade finance, and business services.
He joins Broadridge from TD Securities, where he was most recently Managing Director and Head of Global Operations and Business Services for APAC.
