The World Federation of Exchanges (WFE) on Monday responded to the United Kingdom (UK) Financial Conduct Authority’s (FCA)discussion paper on Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT).
According to the summarized response, the WFE is encouraged by regulators such as the FCA evaluating both the benefits and the risks DLT can bring.
Also, regulatory authorities must remain focused on ensuring investor protection and the safety of markets whilst enabling innovation in financial technology.
While acknowledging much industry and regulatory focus to date has been on DLT and its potential application to financial markets, the WFE’s view is that other technological areas will develop that are at least as important – if not more so – to the exchange and post-trade infrastructure space, such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), big data and robotics.
The WFE believes there should be a globally coherent approach to DLT, to ensure a common approach that encourages innovation, maintains the resilience of the system, and safeguards a level playing field.
Nandini Sukumar, CEO, WFE said: “Regulators can enable innovation while ensuring investor protection and the safety of markets. We also believe that the technology focus is widening beyond DLT and FinTech to areas such as cloud computing, AI, big data and robotics.The UK is amongst the global leaders in FinTech and the FCA itself has a track record of nurturing an innovation-friendly supervisory environment. As the global industry body for exchanges and post-trade infrastructure, the WFE therefore welcomes the opportunity to feed into the FCA’s thinking on DLT.”
