Mizuho Bank, Fujitsu, and Fujitsu Laboratories today announced that they have jointly conducted a trial using blockchain technology to reduce the processing time for cross-border securities transactions, from the current three days to same-day settlement.
The test took place between December 2015 and February 2016 utilizing the Open Assets Protocol (OAP), an open source platform linked to the Bitcoin blockchain.
The program’s goal is to enable low-cost, low-risk cross-border securities transactions by building a system utilizing blockchain tech to enable instantly sharing matched trade information in the post-trade process as tamper-proof data, without building a large-scale settlement system from scratch. This would shorten the time from trade execution to final settlement from the previous three days to the same day.
In conducting the trial, Mizuho Bank was responsible for providing its expertise with the securities settlement process, Fujitsu conducted the development, evaluation, and testing of the trial system, and Fujitsu Laboratories undertook the trial application of blockchain tech.
Within Fujitsu’s cloud environment and using OAP, the three companies developed a “blockchain-forming system” that recorded the information from a confirmation as one linked block. The confirmation matches trading information including securities name, quantity of securities, currency code, amount, country of settlement, settlement type, and settlement date.
A Fujitsu statement read:
In the system, continuously generated blocks containing trade information were chronologically linked as blockchain, becoming information that could not be tampered. And, because the information could be shared between multiple companies, the partners confirmed that it was possible to shorten the time required in the post-trade process.
Using the results from the trail, the three companies plan to determine a path to practical application of blockchain tech for cross-border securities transactions from March 2016.
OAP is an open source protocol developed by Flavien Charlon, the founder of Coinprism, and utilized by Nasdaq and Overstock in issuing digital assets for their customer trials.
