Why South African fund services infrastructure Finswitch is (no pun intended) switching to blockchain

It is not hard to see why centralised financial market infrastructures are more alive than other financial institutions to the opportunities and threats of distributed ledger technologies. They are the neutral entrepots through which data flows between participants in every financial market so, if every market participant can access the same data simultaneously, the occupation of any provider intermediating point-to-point data flows comes into question. In this environment, the wise market infrastructure chooses to disrupt itself before it is disrupted by others. This is the course taken by Finswitch, the financial market infrastructure that provides the South African fund management industry with pricing, transaction processing, income distribution and data services. It is transitioning to a blockchain-based platform which its leadership and shareholders believe will reduce friction and costs and create opportunities to develop new services. Dominic Hobson, co-founder of Future of Finance, spoke to Nick Baikoff, managing director of Finswitch, about why the organisation is adopting blockchain and how it is bringing its shareholders and users with it.