Nordea and Finnish friends to digitalise share trading on blockchain
Asiakastieto, Nordea, OP, Privanet and Tieto have joined forces in Finland to digitalise the trading of non-listed company shares on blockchain.
Finland five turn to blockchain
The fab five say this “first-of-its kind” initiative opens up “significant” opportunities for companies, company personnel, investors, public authorities and financial service providers.
The platform provides a way for trading by digitalising the tokenised share register, shareholder register, issuance of new shares and secondary market trading of shares.
Markus Hautala, head of blockchain solutions at Tieto, says “blockchain presents tremendous opportunities for our society by establishing a new way of creating trust” and their development “revolutionises the way investors and start-ups can transact”.
According to the gang, a “significant” share of Finnish household and enterprise financial assets are in non-listed company shares.
However, in their view, and for the most part, trading on this asset class relies on manual processes. As a consequence, non-listed company shares lack liquidity and the validity of shareholder information is challenging to verify for investors, financial service providers and public authorities.
The five say the newly-developed platform will change this situation by reducing administrative burden and improving visibility to this asset class.
Digital business and consumer information services provider Asiakastieto, financial groups Nordea and OP, investment service group Privanet and software and services company Tieto carried out all the development work in Finland.
The project also included experts and advisory from the Finnish Tax Administration, Finnish Patent and Registration Office as well as Borenius Attorneys.
The platform is based on R3’s open source Corda and Hyperledger Indy distributed ledger technologies.
The network is currently a proof of concept and the plan is to start customer pilots during 2019.
