Nasdaq unveiled a new partnership to promote the modernization of Europe’s capital markets infrastructure through token trading and settlement.
This strategic collaboration aims to bring together Nasdaq’s European trading venues with Caturion, the Börse Stuttgart Group’s pan-European settlement platform for tokenized assets. By creating a single unified platform for the settlement of tokenized assets across Europe, the partnership is a step towards transforming an ecosystem that is traditionally fragmented, inefficient and high-cost.
Nasdaq Newsroom sat down with Roland Chai, EVP and President of European Market Services and Head of Digital Assets at Nasdaq, to learn more about the new partnership:
Can you tell us about today’s announcement with Saturnian?
Roland Tea: It is a partnership to develop new digital post-trade infrastructure – a settlement platform for digital assets. The idea is to begin changing the post-trade landscape in Europe with the accelerated use of tokens, in order to solve the problems caused by the existing patchwork of systems and legal frameworks that can hinder efficient cross-border market activity. It will be developed under the DLT pilot regime set out by EU regulators.
What problem will this partnership solve?
Roland Tea: Europe’s capital markets settlement infrastructure and securities processing infrastructure suffer from inefficiency and fragmentation, resulting in complexity, slow processes and high costs for market participants.
We see this partnership as creating a central digitized platform for post-trade to truly drive a new paradigm in terms of efficiency for Europe. We are helping to reduce costs for investors, improve access to products and drive efficiency across corporate functions such as asset life cycle.
How does digital laser technology actually solve this problem?
Roland Tea: Holding securities on a distributed ledger means there is significant potential for transparency, direct control, and frictionless mobility. This allows you to automate and standardize some of the inefficient workflows that currently happen through multiple parties and legacy processes, which in some cases happen over email. This automates workflows, reduces inefficiencies, and in turn releases capital to support economic growth. Many studies show that these process and disposal inefficiencies cost the industry huge amounts of money every year.
How does the new Saturn partnership relate to Nasdaq’s vision for the future of markets infrastructure?
Roland Tea: We believe in modernizing markets with industrial-grade infrastructure that is resilient and has high integrity. We therefore believe that this partnership with Boers Stuttgart Group’s Saturnian platform enables us to advance our vision for DLT-enabled, always-on markets.
We are placing tokenization at the heart of our capital markets infrastructure in a flexible and high-integrity way.
Where will this partnership focus first?
Roland Tea: We are starting this partnership with structured products – Nasdaq and Börse Stuttgart are leaders in structured product venues, but the process of issuing and settling those products can be particularly cumbersome and inefficient.
We see Saturnion as ideal for tokenizing those structured products, providing a more efficient way to be able to issue and trade them across multiple markets, and then streamlining them on a standardized platform.
Why is Saturn the right partner for Nasdaq in this case? And why is Nasdaq the right partner for them?
Roland Tea: Just as Nasdaq has been at the forefront of modernizing the market architecture, we see in Boers Stuttgart Group an excellent partner in their ability to be agile, forward looking and predict the future development of the capital markets. They share our vision of simplifying and harmonizing capital markets infrastructure to improve Europe’s capital markets ecosystem.
Nasdaq is a trusted market operator and a leader in market modernization. We bring significant operational and regulatory experience and see strong opportunities for this partnership to accelerate our vision of always-on, tech-enabled markets.
What are the next steps?
Roland Tea: This is the beginning of an exciting partnership. We are starting with structured products as a first step, but as the platform attracts more participants, we hope to build a whole new ecosystem that can be truly transformational for the way Europe’s capital markets operate and support the companies and investors they are there to serve.
