A collaboration between Swiss legal, banking, and financial software firms has led to the creation of the Capital Markets and Technology Association (CMTA). The aim is to help smooth the adoption of blockchain in the Swiss financial markets.
Lenz & Staehelin, Switzerland’s largest law firm, Swissquote Bank Ltd, the Swiss leader in online banking, and Temenos, a Swiss market leader in banking software make up the Association.
The firms came together in response to the regulatory uncertainty that impacts the blockchain industry.
The CMTA intends to create open standards and tools that firms can use for efficient and secure capital raises. The standards won’t purely be aimed at start-ups.
All three firms see blockchain’s potential to simplify otherwise complex financial procedure:
“The blockchain technology has the potential to reduce the complexity of the capital markets system and lower the barrier of entry for start-ups,” says Jacques Iffland, CMTA’s chair, and partner at Lenz & Staehelin.
Marc Bürki, CEO of Swissquote, is excited by the opportunity “to simplify the manner in which companies can distribute their securities and raise capital, and also the manner in which investors can acquire and trade these assets”.
And Temenos views blockchain as a way to make banking better. David Arnott, the CEO, sees benefits across the board: “We see the possibility for distributed ledger technologies to simplify banking value chains, speeding up customer fulfillment, lowering costs and democratizing financial services.”
The three firms are joined in the committee by James Larus, Dean of EPFL’s School of Computer and Communication Sciences.
Until the last two months, most ICOs focused on utility tokens. But since then there has been a wave of announcements about ventures concentrating on security tokens. For example, Polymath that bought the domain Tokens.com and partnered with the Barbados Stock Exchange.
