A Future of Finance Interview with Apex Group founder and CEO Peter Hughes and Head of Digital Assets Bruce Jackson.

The Apex Group has grown from an idea in the minds of two people in Bermuda just over 20 years ago to a global fund administration business employing 13,000 people across 112 offices around the world to look after assets under administration worth more than US$1 trillion. Such rapid expansion by acquisition was made possible by the support of major private equity investors – they include Genstar, Carlyle and Mubadala – but Apex is more than a classic roll-up story. The firm has retained its original bias to alternative strategies, but has moved far beyond fund accounting, transfer agency and management company services to embrace capital introductions, depositary and custody services and an Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) ratings and advisory service. But what really distinguishes Apex from other fund administrators is its embrace of new technologies in general and blockchain technologies in particular. It has not only supported several tokenised fund issues but invested in a tokenisation engine (the Luxembourg-based Tokeny) and in the London-based FundAdminChain (which began as a fund tokenisation platform but morphed into an automated investor due diligence checking and on-boarding service). No other fund administrator has shown a comparable level of material commitment to a tokenised future for the funds industry. As Dominic Hobson, Co-founder of Future of Finance, found out when he spoke to Apex Group founder and CEO Peter Hughes and Head of Digital Assets Bruce Jackson, the enthusiasm of the senior management for tokenisation is not about intellectual curiosity but long-term survival and success.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A Future of Finance interview with Robert Koller, co-founder and CEO at NowCM, and Jochen Metzger, Global Head of Markets at NowCM.

The bond and money markets have emerged, for different reasons, as early targets for transformation through the application of blockchain technology. Although the illiquidity of the corporate bond markets in particular is a tempting target for blockchains and tokenisers, several new ventures have aimed instead to improve the notoriously under-digitalised primary market issuance process. A number, despite the materiality of the opportunity, have failed already. But survival is not the only risen why the stealthier rise of NowCM is of interest. The reasons behind its steady success so far include a focus on solving primary market inefficiencies with accurate data rather than process-transforming technology; a commitment to an open rather than a closed network that attracts other specialist service providers and facilitates unthreatening partnerships with both established debt market networks and other start-ups; a recognition that it is wiser to work with the incumbent sell-side intermediaries rather than against them, not least because the buy-side continues to want them to be involved; a preference for conventional technologies that minimise the cost and complexity of connecting users and delivering services; and, lastly, a number of astute acquisitions that have secured solid revenues as well as valuable technology and useful client relationships. Dominic Hobson, co-founder of the Future of Finance, spoke to Robert Koller, co-founder and CEO at NowCOM, and Jochen Metzger, formerly a senior official at the Bundesbank who is now Global Head of Markets at NowCM, about the origins, products, strategy and growth plans of a business that describes itself as both a “data company” and a ”new era market infrastructure.”

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A Future of Finance interview with Nadine Chakar at DTCC.

With the acquisition in October 2023 of Securrency, a FinTech that specialises in the development of blockchain technology for regulated financial institutions, the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC) signalled the end of the experimental phase of its engagement with digital assets. That phase dated back to at least December 2015, when DTCC joined the Linux Foundation Hyperledger project. That was quickly followed by participation in the US$60 million Series A fundraising by Digital Asset Holdings in January 2016, and publication the same month of a white paper on blockchain that warned of the potential “generational disruptive force” of blockchain. DTCC has maintained its interest in blockchain ever since, notably via the launch in November 2021 of DSM, an infrastructure to support the tokenisation of privately managed assets. But the Securrency acquisition gives the clearing and settlement infrastructure the tools it needs to move beyond narrow asset classes and Proofs of Concept (PoCs) and Pilot Tests and actually build an open tokenisation infrastructure for the whole of the American capital markets: a blockchain platform, a tokenisation engine, a smart contract engine, a digital asset custody service, programmable token capabilities, off-chain storage of ledger data and digital identity information, and a set of tools to ensure assets remain compliant as they travel across the digital asset eco-system. The Securrency acquisition also brought to DTCC Nadine Chakar, a senior and experienced securities services executive with an attested appetite for innovation who had joined the firm as CEO only nine months earlier from State Street, where she was Head of Digital. Her appointment as Global Head of DTCC Digital Assets is a boost for those who believe that the key to unlocking the potential of tokenised assets is open infrastructure. To find out if those hopes are justified, read, listen or watch Future of Finance Co-founder Dominic Hobson interviewing Nadine Chakar.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.