Luxembourg moves to make financial services industry more digital

Article published on 24 November 2020 www.igniteseurope.com

Luxembourg has passed a law designed to make its financial services industry more digital, in a move that will enable local lenders and investment firms to electronically store bonds and other assets, Luxembourg Times reports.

Under the new legislation, approved by the parliament of the Grand Duchy yesterday, companies and investors will be able to store digital securities using blockchain technology.

The move comes after local lawmakers approved a legal framework in 2019 that boosted blockchain technology by granting transactions conducted through the technology the same legal status as traditional ones.

Luxembourg Times says the first local real estate fund handed out digital tokens to clients in October last year as it moved to blockchain technology to reduce costs.

Earlier this week FundsDLT, a Luxembourg-based blockchain-based technology platform for the investment fund industry that was initiated by the Luxembourg Stock Exchange, processed a fund purchase transaction that was settled via Deutsche Börse’s post-trade services provider Clearstream.

Zürcher Kantonalbank and Clearstream said this represented their first successfully processed live blockchain-based end-to-end fund transactions, with the two firms highlighting that the processing time for an investor order was reduced from several hours to just a few minutes.

Alfi said at its global fund distribution conference that blockchain would have a “major impact” on the fund industry, affecting the entire value chain from launching to distributing funds, and from managing fund accounts to the settling of trades.

The fund body warned, however, that improvements were necessary to enable blockchain technology to process large amounts of data fast.