A mainFT scoop earlier this week might need prompted emotions of déjà vu for some readers:
The London Inventory Trade Group has drawn up plans for a brand new digital markets enterprise, saying it will make it the primary main change to supply in depth buying and selling of conventional monetary property on the blockchain know-how finest recognized for powering cryptocurrency.
When you’ve received previous the whiplash of successfully listening to “I’m sceptical of crypto however blockchain has potential” rearing its head*, let’s look a bit nearer.
LSEG is, actually by the requirements of its personal inventory change, an attention-grabbing firm. It share worth has risen dramatically over latest years amid its mixture with Refinitiv and the corporate’s continued transformation from mere inventory change (yawn) to a fully-fledged monetary information large (thrilling). Its new slogan is hardly inspiring, however can’t actually be argued with: “Others do a few of what we do, however not the whole lot we do.”
Actually, it seems like precisely the kind of techy London-listed firm that will presently be a flight danger, if it wasn’t for . . . properly, . As a latest Jefferies observe put it:
LSEG’s evolving fairness story is more and more pushed by continued momentum in its subscription-income-generating enterprise strains. The relative positioning of its index and enterprise information companies is already sturdy, in our view.
The “weak hyperlink”, as Jefferies places it, is Refinitiv’s “desktop franchise”, ie Eikon, ie the Bloomberg terminal competitor that’s usually invoked within the sentence “silly f—ing Eikon”. That could change with the arrival of Workspace, its new platform (however Alphaville remembers related chatter about Eikon when that launched again in 2010).
LSEG can be shifting ahead in different areas, together with, natch, AI. As mainFT’s Nikou Asgari reported final month, it has discovered a buddy with advantages on this space:
David Schwimmer, chief government of LSEG, stated the corporate was working with Microsoft to create “bespoke giant language fashions” . . .
Microsoft took a 4 per cent stake in LSEG in December final yr and secured a board seat as a part of a 10-year strategic partnership, marking the most recent in a collection of incursions by Massive Tech into the operation of worldwide capital markets. Seattle-based Microsoft additionally invested $10bn in OpenAI in January.
Jefferies held an name with Paul Dragan, former head of market growth at Eikon, in July. Right here’s a part of what he needed to say concerning the Microsoft connection:
I believe it’s implausible. I believe there have been a number of layers of what was truly going via after we first heard concerning the partnership between Microsoft and Refinitiv. To start with, I believe when you concentrate on possibly the obvious piece for some, which is the cloud, Microsoft Azure providing, and many others., you need to perceive the operational complexity and value for Refinitiv of amassing all of the monetary information on the earth, normalising it, cleaning it, structuring it, but additionally delivering it to their prospects around the globe. So you’ve gotten prospects in Sydney that like to obtain their US market information actually quick and actually contemporary and that’s costly. You’ve quite a lot of handbook work. You’ve quite a lot of infrastructure that Refinitiv has to handle to be able to make that doable.
So having a participant like Microsoft Azure and all their information centres, all their capabilities within the cloud, will certainly have an effect on the infrastructure prices. I believe there’s some nice cost-savings potential for Refinitiv simply just by leveraging what Microsoft Azure has to supply. Refinitiv’s price of sustaining their very own infrastructure is sort of excessive and it must be refreshed. They personal the information centres, they personal the comm strains, and many others. The price of refreshing that’s fairly excessive and it has to occur each three years to be able to be aggressive, and many others. It’ll undoubtedly give LSEG and Refinitiv some cost-savings and permit them to be extra aggressive.
All of it sounds fairly comfortable. However, uh, blockchain? Actually?
We will verify that Microsoft is concerned — LSEG’s head of capital markets Murray Roos instructed mainFT in world unique, previously-unreported feedback (h/t Laura Noonan):
We’ve been investigating a number of the tech and engineering . . . for numerous months with Microsoft.
Plus Microsoft’s international Web3 lead simply kinda tweeted it out:
watch this house 👇
extra info to return quickly 👀https://t.co/n6ZeUyN5Mo
— vassilis.eth (🌆 ,🌆 ) (@TziokasV) September 4, 2023
What can we find out about Microsoft’s blockchain providing?
On the floor, not a complete lot. Chief government Satya Nadella told Davos this year that he believed within the blockchain, however that it wanted “killer apps”. We additionally realize it had a home-made blockchain product on Azure, its internet providers platform, that got canned in 2021 in favour of a third-party offering.
There’s this press release, from Could (our emphasis):
Digital Asset and main market individuals announce their plans to launch the Canton Community, the business’s first privacy-enabled interoperable blockchain community designed for institutional property and constructed to responsibly unlock the potential of synchronized monetary markets.
Canton Community individuals embody 3Homes, ASX, BNP Paribas, Broadridge, Capgemini, Cboe International Markets, Cumberland, Deloitte, Deutsche Börse Group, Digital Asset, DRW, Eleox, EquiLend, FinClear, Gambyl, Goldman Sachs, IntellectEU, Liberty Metropolis Ventures, Microsoft, Moody’s, Paxos, Proper Pedal LendOS, S&P International, SBI Digital Asset Holdings, The Digital Greenback Challenge, Umbrage, Versana, VERT Capital, Xpansiv, and Zinnia.
Canton, the discharge says will present a “decentralised infrastructure” that may join between totally different purposes constructed with Digital Asset’s Daml smart-contract language.
This feels quite a bit the type of factor LSEG has in thoughts, and Microsoft are clearly concerned. We will’t see one other finance-oriented blockchain venture that they’re in mattress with. Nevertheless, Deutsche Börse and CBOE are listed as Canton companions whereas LSEG isn’t — so we’re closely spitballing right here. Certainly, it isn’t even clear that work has actually begun on this blockchain venture.
But when Canton is the framework . . . what’s Digital Asset?
[birdseye camera zooms out from London, planet pivots and spins backwards through time, camera zooms in on A Land Down Under]
From the Australia Monetary Assessment last December:
Digital Asset, the start-up that was constructing the brand new settlement system for the Australian fairness market, has declared the ASX [Australian stock exchange] should shoulder the blame as a result of it modified the scope of the venture and by no means created a plan to repair core points because it started to unravel.
The retort from the New York-based firm comes after ASX chief government Helen Lofthouse earlier this week instructed a parliamentary committee that “escalating delays” in software program growth at Digital Asset have been one of many key causes behind the ASX’s determination to tug the plug on the venture.
This triggered a $250 million write-down, set the vital market infrastructure improve again not less than 5 years, and triggered a lack of religion in ASX’s functionality to handle know-how, infuriating the Reserve Financial institution and company regulator.
[FT coverage of the Australian exchange group’s hilarious blockchain misadventure here]
The ASX commissioned Accenture (who, it ought to be famous, are hardly impartial on this context, given their involvement in pushing blockchain options) to conduct a assessment of the saga (PDF here). Accenture discovered solely 63 per cent of the rebuild was supplied to ASX for testing. A Reuters postmortem from late final yr stated:
Individuals engaged on the venture raised issues that Digital Asset lacked after-market assist and that the ASX had enlisted the corporate with out testing its product for scalability, the particular person stated, including that the concerns went unaddressed. Finally, ASX had 300 folks engaged on the CHESS alternative venture, about one-third of its headcount.
We’re fairly far down a speculation gap right here, however we predict it will actually increase some eyebrows within the Metropolis if LSEG does find yourself in mattress with Digital Asset over this — no matter whether or not or not the latter was in charge for the ASX debacle. However possibly Microsoft could be simply the type of chaperone to make such an association work.
Wild hypothesis however, the larger image continues to be outstanding. A yr on from ASX’s embarrassing and ignominious blockchain blow-up, LSEG’s embrace of the identical tech feels shocking to say the least. We’ll be watching how this develops with nice curiosity.
Digital Asset declined to remark. LSEG declined to remark. Microsoft didn’t reply to a request for remark.
*This additionally isn’t the primary time LSEG has made a blockchain push — in 2017, it partnered with IBM to make a blockchain-based platform for issuing non-public shares in Italian companies via Borsa Italiana, utilizing one thing referred to as the Hyperledger Cloth body. It’s not clear how that has progressed, though Hyperledger lists far fewer “premier members” than it used to.
