It’s not a secret that State Street, the giant US custody bank, is looking to streamline the complex business of securities lending using blockchain. A decades-old industry, securities finance today is a continual dance of manual reconciliation, involving a string of market participants and lending parameters, all of which has become even more complicated since the 2008 financial crash.
In terms of how peer-to-peer securities lending could be deployed, people from the technology architecture and product teams are bullish about what they consider an inevitable change. From the product development side, Nick Delikaris, head of global trading and algorithmic strategies, said that “the whole industry” is looking at a peer-to-peer version of securities lending, and blockchain based solutions are definitely on the cards. He also acknowledged the scale of the challenge.