Today Spanish firm Allfunds, the B2B fund distribution platform for wealth managers and banks, announced a new company, Allfunds Blockchain. Allfunds counts the likes of BNP Paribas and DBS as clients. Its primary platform Connect offers 90,000 funds from 1,700 organizations and has €620 billion ($730bn) assets under administration.
The company says it’s already testing the technology in private sandboxes with major financial institutions and will announce strategic agreements with companies in the sector in the coming weeks.
Allfunds also stated that its exploring projects with companies that are outside the financial sector.
“Blockchain technology is known to deliver greater transparency, enhanced security, improved traceability, increased efficiency and speed of transactions,” said Juan Alcaraz, CEO Allfunds. “Having developed our own proprietary blockchain technology, we will bring to market ground-breaking features and advantages to the wealthtech industry.”
The firm outlined plans for a proprietary blockchain technical solution, and a business solution using smart contracts to enable fund distribution activities. The blockchain platform is a permissioned, adapted version of Ethereum.
Allfunds was founded in Spain in 2000 by Santander with Italian bank Intesa Sanpaolo buying a 50% stake three years later. In 2017 private equity firm Hellman & Friedman (past investments: F1, Nasdaq) and Singapore sovereign fund GIC bought the company. Since then, Credit Suisse took a minority stake following Allfunds’ acquisition of a Credit Suisse company.
Meanwhile, Credit Suisse, alongside Clearstream and Natixis, backed the Series A of Luxembourg Stock Exchange subsidiary FundsDLT which also focuses on fund distribution. A year ago, UK-based Calastone switched its platform to blockchain. At that stage, it processed £170 billion ($218 billion) in transactions monthly.
FNZ has its blockchain-based ChainClear system, which has been adopted for fund administration by South Africa’s FinSwitch. And French fund management platform IZNES was developed by SETL.
Update: The article was updated with details about the blockchain protocol.
