National Settlement Depository (NSD) took part in Sibos 2017, an international conference that was held in Toronto, Canada.
Sibos is one of the key financial forums organized by SWIFT. It traditionally brings together guests from various countries, including heads and experts of financial companies and banks, representatives of regulators and infrastructure, transnational corporations, and high tech companies.
NSD has been a regular participant at the international forum. NSD is the largest user of SWIFT in the Russian market; it acts as a CSD and nationally important payment system. Eddie Astanin, Chairman of NSD’s Executive Board, is a member of the Board of Directors of SWIFT, and his work in the organization is focused on developing SWIFT in the interests of global users taking into account the position of ROSSWIFT, the Russian community of SWIFT users.
This year, National Settlement Depository was represented at the conference by Eddie Astanin, Maria Krasnova, Deputy Chairman of the Executive Board, Sergey Putyatinskiy, member of the Executive Board and IT Director, Artem Duvanov, Director of Innovations, and Alexander Yakovlev, Head of Distributed Accounting Systems.
A few important initiatives for Russia were presented at Sibos. In particular, an agreement between ROSSWIFT and SWIFT for special fees for internal traffic was announced. Now, as of 1 January 2018, all Russian users will get a discount on fees for messages distributed within the country.
Mr. Putyatinskiy spoke at the panel session dedicated to distributed ledger technology. He described NSD’s unique experience in using blockchain to solve some applied business tasks. In 2017, NSD, together with Raiffeisenbank and MegaFon, carried out settlements on commercial bonds via the blockchain-based platform. The next development stage will be the creation of a system for the safekeeping and record-keeping of digital assets via interactions with the Waves platform (this development hinges on an appropriate legislative framework for this category of assets being adopted).
Also, solutions providing for confidentiality during the verification of transactions in distributed ledgers developed by NSD were presented at the Hyperledger stand. This project has been implemented via the Hyperledger Fabric platform; it allows for any digital asset to be issued and circulated.
Mr. Yakovlev spoke about the process of developing and implementing the project and pointed out its advantages. In the future, NSD’s solution may be adapted for solving a wide range of tasks: product and service supplies, recording and transferring rights, financial operations, and quality control.
Mr. Astanin said: “Sibos is becoming a more and more important site for global players. This year, the forum set records in the importance of initiatives and agreements achieved. Attention was focused on technologies which fully reorganize the financial industry. NSD’s achievements in the FinTech field were highly commended by global leaders, and we think this means that we have chosen the correct vector for developing Russia’s financial infrastructure.”