SETL, the London based institutional payment and settlement infrastructure based on blockchain technology, announced the completion of its first round of private fundraising today.
SETL also announced additional appointments to its board. Rachel Lomax, former Deputy Governor of the Bank of England and Ed Richards, former CEO of Ofcom, join the SETL board, following the appointment of Sir David Walker as SETL Chairman in December 2015. The company will also shortly announce the name of a further appointment to the Board, who is an experienced executive board member and non-executive in government, including at agencies in the national security sector.
SETL was launched in July 2015 to deploy a multi-asset, multi-currency institutional payment and settlements infrastructure based on blockchain technology. The SETL system will enable 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.
Since launch, SETL announced a breakthrough in technology, allowing the platform to process over 1.4bn transactions per day; launched their blockchain-powered OpenCSD platform, enabling market participants to run permissioned registry service for payments, settlement and clearing of cash and other financial instruments; and demonstrated Australia’s first working blockchain solution in collaboration with Computershare.
SETL’s Chairman, Sir David Walker, said: “This is a milestone in the development of SETL and one which I believe strengthens the company’s position significantly. At this stage in the company’s growth it is important to choose the right partners and to deliver a dependably resilient product to the market.”
Sir David Walker continued: “We are also delighted to confirm further appointments to the board. Joining as non-executives are Rachel Lomax and Ed Richards. Each of these directors brings a wealth of experience in the financial, regulatory and corporate governance spheres. Their oversight of the growth and development of SETL will be invaluable to the executive team and shareholders alike”. SETL is very mindful of the dependability and resilience of its systems and interfaces and we are delighted to welcome a further colleague to add counsel to the board, regulators, customers and shareholders.
Peter Randall, CEO of SETL, added: “We are pleased to announce that we have closed fundraising with initial partners and have agreed scope on a number of projects. With the recent announcement of our OpenCSD product, the completion of the funding arrangements and our board appointments, I am excited about developments ahead.
We believe we have a technological lead in this area having demonstrated the ability to process billions of transactions a day and are unique in having a financial grade product on the shelf and ready to go. We have already received significant indications of interest in the OpenCSD product and are in the process of choosing the initial implementation cases”.
Randall concluded: “I do not underestimate the challenges of re-tooling some of the most fundamental elements of our financial infrastructure but the benefits of doing so are significant and widespread. We are strongly positioned to commence that transformation and look forward to making further announcements shortly.”
Background
Biographies
Rachel Lomax, former Deputy Governor of the Bank of England
Rachel Lomax is a senior independent director at HSBC Holdings and Chair of the Group Conduct and Values Committee.She is a non-executive director at Heathrow Airport and Serco, and a member of the supervisory board at Arcus European Infrastructure Fund. Among her other activities, she is a trustee of Imperial College, London and a member of the Advisory Council of the Institute of Business Ethics. Previously she was Deputy Governor (Monetary Policy) at the Bank of England (2003 - 2008), and served as permanent secretary of three government departments. She has also held senior positions at the World Bank, the Cabinet Office and the Treasury.
Ed Richards, former CEO of Ofcom
Ed Richards is a co-Managing Partner of Flint Global a business advisory specialist in the interface between companies and regulators, competition authorities, governments and legislators. He was formerly Chief Executive of the UK communications regulator Ofcom for more than eight years until January 2015 and during this time was Vice Chairman of the Body of European Regulators. He was previously a senior advisor to the Prime Minister for media, telecoms, the internet and e-government, and Director of Corporate Strategy at the BBC. He is currently leading the independent review of financial services trade associations, he is also a director of Donmar Warehouse and a Governor of the London School of Economics. He is an independent non-executive director of Thames Water Utilities Limited
Future Appointment
Recently retired from the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office with a career focused on national security questions and capabilities, and undertaking service in the Middle East, South Asia and Europe. For the last decade he has overseen the transformation of some of the UK's most sensitive technical systems and as Senior Information Risk Owner was responsible for securing these against cyber and insider threats. He has extensive experience of managing technical risk and other vulnerabilities to strategic information systems in the most testing of circumstances.
SETL Development Limited
SETL Development Limited launched in July 2015 to deploy a multi-asset, multi-currency institutional payment and settlements infrastructure based on blockchain technology. The SETL system 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.
The initiative is led by Peter Randall, the former CEO and founder of Chi-X, the pan-European equities trading venue. The SETL management team comprises: Peter Randall, CEO; Anthony Culligan, Product CEO; Nicholas Pennington, CTO; and Francois Barthelemy, Head of Corporate Strategy.
In December 2015, SETL announced Sir David Walker as its chair. Sir David is a former Executive Director of the Bank of England and has served as the chairman of Barclays, Morgan Stanley International, the Securities and Investment Board and as deputy chairman of Lloyds TSB. Before his career in financial markets, Sir David served as an Assistant Secretary to the Treasury, for the UK Government. Sir David Walker is a senior member of the influential G30 group whose continuing agenda includes appraisal of major developments in the global financial markets.
The SETL technology has been designed from the ground up to meet the needs of the finance industry and eliminate some of the concerns raised about the use of blockchain technology for financial markets. These include anonymity, typical for ‘permissionless’ blockchains such as the bitcoin blockchain, which would present challenges to AML / KYC obligations of financial institutions, and the limited capacity and speed of current blockchains, not designed to handle the required volume of financial transactions. SETL is a real-time, real-world system and as such will offer connectivity and compatibility with existing work flows, systems, standards and regulations.
