News

Scotiabank, AlphaPoint announce successful blockchain trial

March 21, 2017

Scotiabank and AlphaPoint, a financial services infrastructure firm specializing in blockchain technology, have completed a successful proof of technology of the AlphaPoint distributed ledger platform, a press release announced.

The AlphaPoint platform enables firms to digitize financial instruments on its proprietary distributed ledger; rapidly create trading venues for those blockchain assets; and manage pretrade and post-trade workflows in concert with existing systems.

As part of the multimonth Scotiabank project, trade reports were submitted to a deployment of the AlphaPoint distributed ledger platform, which ran simultaneously on the Microsoft Azure cloud and AlphaPoint hardware.

In real time, the blockchain network converted FIXML messages to smart contracts and created an immutable "single truth" across the entire network, the release said.

Features of the AlphaPoint full-stack platform include:

• integrated communication with legacy systems;
• high throughput — thousands of events per second with subsecond confirmation times;
• user-level access controls; and
• deterministic smart contracts.

A recent study conducted by Accenture and McLagan estimated that financial institutions can save $8–$12 billion annually through at-scale use of blockchain technology, including savings of up to 70 percent in reporting, 50 percent in post-trade workflow and 50 percent in compliance.