NASDAQ Collaborates In SEB’s Blockchain Investment For Mutual Funds Market

Author: Roger Aitken / Source: Forbes

Leading Nordic financial services group SEB, with a presence in around twenty countries including the Baltic states, Denmark and Germany with total assets of SEK2,777 billion (c.$341bn), and Nasdaq have announced a joint project to test a “developed prototype” for a mutual fund trading platform based on blockchain technology.

The aim of the exercise is to increase efficiency in the processing of purchases and sales of fund units and to create a unit ledger. This is an area that is largely characterized today by manual routines, long settlement cycles and paper-driven processes and orders still via fax.

“With the help of a blockchain we can create a faster, simpler, more effective and reliable fund market,” stated Göran Fors, acting head of Investor Services at SEB in Stockholm.

Fors, who previously worked in Custody Services & Operations Management at Swedbank and Gotabank and has been has been a Director of SWIFT since 2009, added: “Funds are increasingly important for our clients and it is with great pleasure that we can announce this important project together with Nasdaq.” SEB continues to invest in the post-trade space to drive efficiencies.

Magnus Haglind, SVP & Head of Product Management, Market Technology, Nasdaq, commenting in the wake of the development by the two parties said: “By leveraging blockchain technology there is strong potential for improvement via digitalization that can reduce manual work, create a faster process and reduce the risk for errors.”

According to Haglind this development will “look to benefit the fund market and, in the end, also the individual investors through faster response from purchases and sales.”

The concept of the project indicates that, by subscribing to a private blockchain, the various market participants – fund companies, distributors and others – will be able to share a distributed database in which all transactions and changes are registered among all participants in real-time.

This cooperation agreement entails that SEB and Nasdaq will continue to develop the technology with the end objective of creating a working prototype, which will be based on the Chain.com blockchain ledger.

Based in San Francisco, Chain partners with leading organizations around the world to – as it describes – “build, deploy and operate blockchain networks that enable breakthrough financial products and services.” Aside from…

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