‘The industry spends $131 billion on post-trade settlement and servicing, driven by stubbornly high levels of inter- and intra-firm reconciliation, a lack of operational scale and an archaic and overly complex asset-servicing stack.’ Capital Markets Vision 2022 – Accenture, 2017
This was one of the headlines in the Accenture paper of 2017 titled ‘Capital Markets Vision 2022’, which outlined what the capital markets landscape could look like five years out. And whilst some of their other predictions may well have become reality, it is fair to say that little progress has been made on reducing what seemed at the time like an eye-watering – but realistic – cost. In fact, given some of the macro challenges the industry has faced since the article was written, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to predict that this number has actually increased from when it was calculated. So, can the world of DeFi help to address this cost problem? Take a look at our views here