The Nordic financial Services Group SEB and Nasdaq Inc have come together in order to create a “developed prototype” of a mutual fund trading platform based on the blockchain technology. This collaboration and trial are currently aimed at Swedish market in an attempt to simplify things and make the process faster.
The newly distributed ledger will allow all the participants to trade in real-time and digitally record all the transactions and changes while overcoming the existing complex, paper-based transactions which involves long settlement cycles. This means that the overall efforts are directed towards increasing the efficiency in the Swedish fund market which lacks a central entity responsible to record fund holdings.
Blockchain, which is a shared ledger of transactions and is backed by a computer network helps to overcome this issue and streamline the process making it more fast and transparent. It doesn’t need any central authority to control, and so even in the nascent stage of development, it is backed by many financial institutions across the globe.
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Göran Fors, acting head of Investor Services at SEB, said:
“With the help of a blockchain we can create a faster, simpler, more effective and reliable fund market.Funds are increasingly important for our clients and it is with great pleasure that we can announce this important project together with Nasdaq.”
The same thoughts on the collaboration were later echoed and backed by Magnus Haglind, SVP & Head of Product Management, Market Technology, Nasdaq. He said:
“By leveraging blockchain technology there is strong potential for improvement via digitalization that can reduce manual work, create a faster process and reduce the risk for errors.” He further added that all this development will “look to benefit the fund market and, in the end, also the individual investors through faster response from purchases and sales.”