Highlights:

  • Fnality will use digital versions of currencies to replace some of the cumbersome processes and paperwork involved in transferring value between financial organizations.
  • Euroclear announced the purchase of a modest share in the three-year-old consortium Fnality as it expands into Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) or blockchain.

With more and more established institutions teaming up with newcomers in crypto technology, Euroclear, a Belgium-based financial services company, announced that it has joined a consortium of banks building a payment system for tokenized assets.

Euroclear announced the purchase of a modest share in the three-year-old consortium Fnality as it expands into Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) or blockchain. This technology underpins crypto-assets like bitcoin.

Euroclear, which settles into stock and bond trades, the final leg of a transaction where cash is swapped for legal ownership of an asset, said it aims to settle tokenized assets, or digital securities, against digital cash on DLT faster and more efficiently.

Fnality, whose founding shareholders include more than a dozen global banks, said Euroclear’s involvement would expand the consortium’s footprint in market infrastructure, the financial system’s basic plumbing, as it moves from testing to implementing its plan this year.

“This has obvious positive implications for the execution of our business,” Fnality Chief Executive Rhomaios Ram said in a statement.

Fnality will use digital versions of currencies to replace some of the cumbersome processes and paperwork involved in transferring value between financial organizations.

Last year, the Bank of England permitted a new type of account at the central bank to serve a wider range of anticipated payments systems, including those based on blockchain.

The BoE has received an application from Fnality to make it an operator of such an account and is due to go live with its pound sterling payment system from October.

Euroclear, which settled the equivalent of 992 trillion euros (USD 1,095 trillion) in security last year, is owned by a group of banks and exchanges, including Euronext and the London Stock Exchange Group.

The list of founding shareholders includes Banco Santander, BNY Mellon, Banco Santander, Barclays, Commerzbank, CIBC, Credit Suisse, ING, Lloyds Banking Group, KBC Group, Mizuho Bank, Nasdaq, State Street Corporation, MUFG Bank, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, and UBS.