Blockchain-based trade matching engine gets the nod from ING

ING believes the days of mismatched trading tickets could be drawing to a close after conducting tests of a blockchain-powered trade confirmation platform in partnership with Calypso and the R3 consortium.

R3 partnered with Calypso Technology in November last year to develop a multi-party trade confirmation system running on the Corda distributed ledger-based smart contract platform.

Calypso was the first application partner to adopt the R3 platform, utilising the technology to enable counterparties to see all trade tickets on the distributed ledger so they can be sure they are matching against the correct trade.

ING was one of a group of international banks to process FX trades across the pilot platform, and confirmed correct matching in real time across four different time zones.

“This is a big step in changing the way institutions process trade contracts,” says Ivar Wiersma, head of wholesale banking innovation at ING.

Rather than cross-referencing across multiple datasets to confirm a transaction, the R3/Calypso platform provides traders with a single golden copy of the trade, enabling participants to update their records from this ‘single source of truth’ and avoiding mismatches or duplications that need to be fixed manually.

Robbert Zee, who was part of the working group on ING’s side, says: “Using one source of proof is a great advantage for security and compliance reasons: regulators can have a real-time overview of the trades by linking in to the network to follow trade partners’ actions.”