The company that last year processed $1.6 quadrillion in securities has a lot to lose if it is cut out of the financial food chain. As a result, the Depository Trade & Clearing Corporation ( DTCC ) has been working diligently for the past several months to position itself at the center of a wide-range of experiments other companies are conducting with blockchain technology.
Instead of fighting against the distributed ledger technology popularized by bitcoin, the DTCC has embraced the new tool and is doing what it can to help define the future architecture of the industry, even if that means changing the company business model.
Robert Palatnick, chief technology architect at DTCC, told CoinDesk: "Part of our responsibility of helping the industry to innovate is [looking at] how to bring distributed ledgers into consideration for solving some industry problems. If it means we modify our business model to accommodate that, then that’s the way the industry uses us." The DTCC charges account fees to its users in addition to recurring monthly fees and processing fees. With total securities processed in excess of $1qn per year, its fees that average in the fractions of a cent added up to $1.4bn in its most recent annual report .
But the blockchain’s ability — in theory — to let the corporation’s customers conduct post-trade solutions on their own could force a change. Blockchain education
To educate itself on the potential disruption, the DTCC joined the non-profit Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Project in December 2015, and its systems director Pardha Vishnumolakala is now on the project’s technical steering committee ,
Though still in early stages, the Hyperledger Project aims to offer open-source financial solutions using blockchain tech.
But that was just the beginning of the company’s push, Palatnick said.
A month later, DTCC joined the largest investment to date […]
