Singapore-based DBS bank, the largest lender in Southeast Asia, has said it is the first bank in Asia to complete an intraday repurchase transaction on a blockchain-based network.
The transaction was completed on JPMorgan’s intraday repurchase application on Onyx Digital Assets, which enables instant settlements and maturity of transactions within hours instead of the current industry norm of one to two working days.
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Fast facts
- “Repurchase agreements or repos are a traditional and well-established method of raising financing, but infrastructural and technical inefficiencies meant the minimum term has usually been one day,” Andrew Ng, head of Treasury and Markets at DBS, said in a statement on Wednesday.
- “Through leveraging efficiencies of a blockchain-based solution, we are able to raise USD funding in compressed timeframes which are beneficial to our liquidity needs,” Ng added.
- DBS is at the center of developments led by the city state’s central bank, the Monetary Authority of Singapore, to explore digital technologies around blockchain.
- Earlier this month, DBS had said it was one of the first banks to test the trading of foreign exchange and government securities using permissioned decentralized finance (DeFi) liquidity pools on a public blockchain.
- The trades – part of the city-state’s Project Guardian to explore and test financial technology developments – comprised purchase and sale of tokenized Singapore government securities, the Singapore dollar, Japan government bonds and Japanese yen.
- See related article: In a Q&A, Singapore lender DBS explains its DeFi experiments, plans