Blockchain Firm SETL Sells Minority Stakes To Banks

Announcements, Blockchain, News | February 20, 2018 By:

London-based blockchain firm SETL has announced that two banking institutions have taken minority stakes in the company.

The two banks – financial services group Citi and French banking institution Credit Agricole – will join Computershare, S2iEM, and Deloitte as shareholders in the company. Additionally, Computershare has increased its stake in the company, and Stuart Irving, CEO of Computershare, is joining its board of directors.

Launch in 2015, SETL enables market participants to move cash and assets directly between each other, facilitating the immediate and final settlement of market transactions. The SETL system maintains a permissioned distributed ledger of ownership and transaction records, simplifying the process of matching, settlement, custody, registration and transaction reporting.

SETL Chairman David Walker said that Irving’s addition to the board will be of significant benefit to the executive team and shareholders and stakeholders alike. “Stuart Irving bring a wealth of experience in the financial, regulatory, IT and public company spheres,” he said.

Irving noted that Computershare is convinced that the future of building systems that record ownership depends on them having provability at their core, and that this feature of the SETL offering is a significant competitive differentiator.

Last month, OFI Asset Management, an investment solutions provider for French and European investors, successfully carried out live blockchain transactions on SETL‘s IZNES, the pan-European fund record-keeping platform based on blockchain technology. IZNES enables firms to enter into new relationships with investors and manage KYC (know your customer) processes. It also enables investors and distributors to easily subscribe and redeem fund units via a direct connection with the asset management company.

“We are unique in having both a financial grade product and a proven deployment route,” said SETL CEO Peter Randall. “SETL has successfully deployed multiple environments capable of processing in excess of 80,000 transactions per second across real world, globally distributed networks with over 100 million concurrent accounts.”