EquiLend announced the launch of a pilot for its distributed ledger technology (DLT) based 1Source initiative. Several of the securities lending industry’s largest agent lenders and broker-dealers are among the participants actively integrating to EquiLend 1Source. The fully automated DLT system will go live across the market in 2024.
The EquiLend 1Source ledger will retain a central record of the agreements made between counterparties in a securities lending transaction. This eliminates mismatched trade details — which are common in existing workflow—that are currently resolved only through manual, costly reconciliation processes.
According to an analysis conducted by an independent consulting firm, ensuring all lifecycle events remain in sync for both counterparties in a transaction, 1Source could reduce industry costs by up to $100 million per year.
Ken DeGiglio, chief information officer at EquiLend, said in a statement: “When we developed the concept for EquiLend 1Source with the industry’s Digital Transformation Working Group, our goal was to solve critical industry pain points and to empower businesses to continue to trade accurately and efficiently. The successful launch of the EquiLend 1Source pilot shows that the market shares that vision, and that a new, modernized and efficient chapter has begun for the securities finance industry.”
Last year, EquiLend announced its 1Source initiative, born out of the EquiLend-convened Digital Transformation Working Group, consisting of many of the most influential securities finance firms globally. Since then, the initiative has harnessed emerging technologies, such as DLT, to develop an industry-wide “single source of truth” for transaction lifecycle events in the securities finance industry. Firms utilizing the EquiLend Spire system, NGT trading platform and EquiLend’s Risk Resolution Suite (R2S) will benefit from seamless integration into EquiLend 1Source.
Earlier this year, the company joined the Canton Network in partnership with Digital Asset and other participating firms across the industry and built its 1Source initiative on the Canton ledger.