Building on the continued success of its tokenisation initiatives in the repo space, Broadridge Financial Solutions is beginning to leverage its Distributed Ledger Repo (DLR) platform to support other liquid assets and to meet general marketplace demand for collateral mobility.
This past June, DLR processed an average of $357 billion in daily repo transactions, with volumes totalling $7.5 trillion. The daily average was a 68% increase year-over-year, reflecting the continued evolution of tokenised market infrastructure and its expanding role in today’s funding and collateral markets.DLR enables trading firms to settle repo transactions using a DLT platform without disrupting existing trading and post-trade workflows. By facilitating the efficient movement of tokenised securities, DLR helps firms improve capital utilization, increase funding flexibility and streamline collateral management.
Says Horacio Barakat, Global Head of Digital Innovation at Broadridge: “DLR’s continued growth reflects the market’s increasing demand for more efficient, reliable collateral mobility. Today, we are helping market participants mobilise US Treasury collateral more effectively at scale across the repo market.”
Now, as market participants are becoming more comfortable with DLT approaches, Broadridge is moving DLR beyond providing a point solution for repos to become a generalised platform that can support additional asset classes.
“Building on its repo foundation, we are broadening DLR’s capabilities to support other high-quality liquid assets, including JGBs, and extending the infrastructure into additional workflows such as securities lending,” notes Barakat, who affirms that DLT platforms are now finding their sweet spots in financial transaction processing. “Institutions are moving beyond evaluating DLT. They’re incorporating it into their day-to-day market activity. That shift reflects growing confidence that tokenised settlement can support the scale, resiliency and performance required by today’s capital markets.”
One proof point for DLR’s acceptance in trading operations is that data from the platform is now available via Bloomberg terminals. Through a collaboration with Kaiko, which handles the technical aspects of extracting DLT-based data and translating it to Bloomberg’s data standards, DLR data including repo par value, turnover and trade count is now available alongside other fixed income data.
Launched in 2021, DLR’s development was informed by earlier pilots using the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain and conducted with Natixis and Societe Generale. But for its initial commercial release, the DLR architecture evolved to run smart contracts written in Digital Asset’s Daml language.
Adopting Daml also led to Broadridge using the private VMware Blockchain platform, since it was the generally available and supported DLT for Daml. The VMware platform handled network consensus and scalability aspects while Daml was used to model the repo agreements.
In 2023, Broadridge moved DLR from the VMware platform to the Canton Network DLT, which was also developed by Digital Asset. Canton is a privacy-enabled, public but permissioned blockchain network natively designed to support Daml. Canton allows Broadridge to maintain strict data segregation and compliance controls while structurally connecting DLR to a broader, composable financial network and ecosystem.
Broadridge’s DLR evolution has tracked an increasingly common industry direction of careful migration from private DLT platforms to public ones. Importantly, the public networks chosen are generally those that support data and transaction privacy, while also allowing participants to leverage potential liquidity network effects offered by a more open architecture.
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