Credit Suisse Completes Joint Mutual Fund Transactions Using Blockchain

Global investment bank Credit Suisse and Portuguese Banco Best have completed end-to-end fund transactions on blockchain, according to a press release published Feb. 7.

The financial institutions have reportedly processed every part of the fund trade process by implementing a blockchain-based decentralized platform, FundsDLT.

Designed to improve the efficiency of fund transaction processing with the use of blockchain and smart contracts, FundsDLT would purportedly reduce the time between request and the settlement from delivery of the order to trade processing.

Within the initiative, Lisbon-based Banco Best — specializing in banking, asset management and trading — was responsible for the Application Programming Interface (API) integration, and also developed a dedicated application to collect client experiences.

An end-to-end or mutual fund transaction represents a pool of money from a group of investors that is put into a portfolio of stocks, bonds and government securities and which is considered to be different from buying and selling stocks.

Claude Metz, Head of Shareholder Services at Credit Suisse, Luxemburg S.A, noted that the distributed ledger technology (DLT) would be combined with Know Your Customer (KYC) servicing.

Previously, Credit Suisse — which was responsible for around $800 billion in assets in 2017 — successfully conducted the first live transaction of $30 million in securities on blockchain consortium R3’s Corda Blockchain platform in cooperation with Dutch-based ING financial service.