The general director of the Australian Stock Exchange of Securities said on Thursday that replacing the existing settlement system with a distributed registry system would help the company save $ 23 billion.
Dominic Stevens, CEO of the operator of the exchange ASX Limited, described how the use of DLT technology instead of the existing Clearing House Electronic Subregister System (CHESS) will improve the efficiency of the exchange and improve the provision of messaging and access to information.
"Currently, the cost of clearing and settlement transactions is about $ 100 million dollars, and the total cost of all communications and other operations for the ‘super-industry’ is approaching $ 23 billion", Stevens said. "Being an excellent tool available to our customers, DLT will bring huge benefits and will be an important incentive for innovations for issuers and investors."
"Participants send messages daily to the CHESS database and back to ensure that everything is agreed. In the framework of this process, mistakes often occur, the correction of which is very expensive. In addition, the databases of participants may differ, which means that different versions of the software, in fact, perform the same operations", he said during the presentation.
Stevens is sure that all these problems can solve the distributed registry (blockchain). In the new system, participants will start the nodes instead of sending messages and connect to the entire database, rather than to a set of "disparate databases," which will help to fix the errors. However, those clients who do not want to run nodes will still be able to receive messages.
The first statement that the Australian Stock Exchange will start working on the blockchain, appeared in December last year. Then ASX confirmed that the blocking technology will replace its current clearing and settlement system CHESS. ASX became the first major stock exchange, which decided to take such a step.
Earlier this year, the stock exchange announced that it was waiting for comments regarding its decision. This Thursday, Stevens confirmed that ASX plans to complete the transition to the new system by 2020.