The business of securities settlement ought to look like a club night with Pete Tong. Just as the DJ and electronic music pioneer stands before a crowd effortlessly manipulating gigabytes of music from a single iPad, the back offices of the world’s financial institutions are supposed to allow traders to switch in and out of trillions of dollars worth of assets without skipping a beat.
In reality, their performance looks more like Rick Wakeman, the keyboardist from the 1970s prog rock band Yes, who would frantically wave his wizard-robed arms as he yanked cables out of a dozen incompatible boxes.
Harmonising the ledgers of the world’s banks requires scarcely less skill and energy. Records of trades have to be compiled and entered into those systems from the phone calls, emails and post-lunch handshakes that constitute the original bargains. Reconciling those trades and ensuring that all parties have the same records is a painstaking business. Electronic trade confirmations help, especially for standardised products, but in many markets paper tickets are still the norm.
Not all failures are as spectacular as those which culminated with Kweku Adoboli of UBS being found with up to $2bn of losses on unconfirmed deal tickets in his desk drawer. But mistakes slip through the net all the time, and cost money when they do. In the US Treasury market alone, about $50bn of trades “fail” every business day, incurring a charge equivalent to 3 per cent interest a year on the delinquent balances. Including private sector markets, the total volume of fails is likely to be in the hundreds of billions.
In the world of stadium rock, the problem of standardisation was solved long ago. You do not see Radiohead’s Thom Yorke posing in front of a huge stack of electronics resembling a telephone exchange, because in 1983 the makers of synthesisers and keyboards agreed on a common standard that lets you plug one into another without an impressive work of amateur electronics.
Financiers may not have noticed, but a technology has been invented that would solve their compatibility problem, too. Its name is bitcoin, although it could probably do with a new one; a whiff of sulphur still clings to cryptographic currencies because of their historical association with anarchists and the customers of the Silk Road online narcotics emporium. Richard Gendal of IBM has suggested that the underlying system should be called “shared ledger technology” instead.
So far as legitimate finance is concerned, the utility of this technology has little to do with its supposed ability to make transactions untraceable — a feature, if that is what it is, which can easily be switched off. It has everything to do with the “blockchain”, a public record of transactions that is updated whenever one person sends payment in bitcoins to another. Every bitcoin user can consult this shared ledger, and any copy is as good as another; there is no uniquely authoritative source. Clever encryption keeps the copies in sync, by making it easy to tell whether one of them has been doctored.
This is exactly what securities settlement needs: a way of recording every transaction once, sharing that record between the counterparties in exactly the same form, and updating in an agreed and standardised manner. It provides an easy way to set up the settlement systems for new or customised products.
It also automatically creates a full, agreed record of transactions, which would assist risk management and compliance functions hugely. And, with such a system in place, it should be straightforward to ensure that netting opportunities are never missed; if one trader sells units in an exchange traded fund and a colleague buys units in the same fund, their institution need not transact with any external parties.
There is the potential for cost savings that go well beyond eliminating mistakes. Back-office employees earn salaries into six figures for reconciling settlements and confirming trades by hand. (One of the shameful secrets of financial services is how many people do jobs that could be made obsolete by a small computer program for pasting data from one window into another.)
The biggest obstacle to the adoption of “shared ledger”, of course, is one which has delayed much necessary investment in the past. It is unlikely that the banks will take on bitcoin in its current form, so they will have to agree on the design of a new standard. That means working together and trusting each other. Alas, those are habits that come less easily to bankers than to musicians.
證券結算營業應當像在俱樂部裏渡過一個有皮特•唐(Pete Tong)陪同的夜晚那樣。這位DJ和電輔音樂前驅會站在觀眾眼前，僅用一台iPad絕不辛苦地把持海量的音樂，一樣的，環球金融機構的背景本來也應讓生意業務員可以或許一拍不漏地買入和賣出代價數萬億美元的資產。
但是，在實際中，他們的表示看起來更像是上世紀70年月前衛搖滾樂隊Yes的鍵盤手裏克•韋克曼(Rick Wakeman)，後者將會穿戴巫師袍，猖狂地揮動著袖子從12個不兼容的樂器盒裏抽線。
調和環球各銀行的賬目須要的技能和精神一點也不比那少。最初經由過程手機、電子郵件或是在午飯上談成的生意業務，必需記載、匯總並錄入那些體系。整頓那些生意業務並確保各方的生意業務記載雷同是個貧苦差事。電子生意業務確認不無用途，特別是對尺度化產物而言，但在很多市場上，紙質票據還是主流。
並不是全部毛病都那末讓人木雞之呆，不外瑞銀(UBS)的奎庫•阿多博利(Kweku Adoboli)的那次毛病算是至高無上了——他人在他辦公桌抽屜裏發明了一堆未確認的生意業務票據，致使了20億美元的喪失。不外，漏網之“誤”老是會有，一旦產生就會造成喪失。僅在美國國債市場，每一個生意業務日就有約莫500億美元的生意業務“失足”，釀成的用度相稱於一年對未償債務收取3%的利錢。包含私家部分市場在內，毛病總範圍大概以數千億盤算。
在舞台搖滾(stadium rock)的天下裏，尺度化題目早已辦理。你不會看到“電台司令”(Radiohead)的湯姆•約克(Thom Yorke)站在像手機交流機同樣的一大堆電子樂器前，由於在1983年，合成器和鍵盤的制作商殺青了同一尺度協定，這讓樂手們不消成為半個電子專家也能銜接好線纜。
金融業人士大概沒有留意到，但可以或許辦理兼容性題目的技巧也已創造出來。它的名字是比特幣，不外它八成也不否決有個新名字;秘鑰泉幣仍舊帶有一點炸藥味，由於它們曩昔與無當局主義者有些連累，發賣麻醉品的在線商城“絲綢之路”的用戶也曾應用這類泉幣舉行生意業務。IBM的理查德•根達爾(Richard Gendal)表現，這類基本體系應更名為“同享賬目技巧”。
這類技巧對正當金融的服從，無關乎其所謂讓生意業務沒法追蹤的才能——這一功效(假如能叫做功效的話)可隨意馬虎封閉。其服從與“區塊鏈”(blockchain)親密相幹——區塊鏈是一種公然的生意業務記載，每當有一人向另外一人付出比特幣時，這個記載就會更新。每位比特幣應用者均可以查閱這個同享帳本，全部拷貝都同樣靠得住;沒有任何奇特的威望起源。聰慧的加密算法可讓辨認某個拷貝是不是受到了改動變得輕易，從而讓全部拷貝堅持同步。
這恰是證券結算所須要的：一種記載每筆生意業務的方法，在生意業務方之間以完整雷同的情勢分享該記載，然後以協商同等的尺度化方法更新。它為新的大概定制產物供給了一種創立結算體系的輕便辦法。
它也會主動創立一份周全而獲得同等承認的生意業務記載，這將極大地有助於危害治理和合規本能機能。而有了如許一個體系，確保軋差機遇從不會被錯過應當會變得易如反掌。假如一位生意業務員賣出了一支生意業務所生意業務基金(ETF)的一些份額，而他(她)的同事買入了一樣的一支基金，則他們所屬的那家金融機構無需與任何外部生意業務方生意業務。
這類技巧有大概勤儉的本錢將遠不但限於清除失足機遇。背景員工拿著6位數的薪水，做的工作不外是手工致理結算和確認生意業務(在金融辦事業，只需編一個將數據從一個窗口粘貼到另外一個窗口的小法式，就會讓很多人賦閑，這是這一行的一個可恥的機密)。
采取“同享賬目”面對一個最大的停滯，這個停滯在曩昔固然也曾耽誤了很多亟需的投資。銀行不太大概會應用當前情勢的比特幣，是以它們將必需就新尺度的計劃殺青同等。這象征著要互助，要互相信賴。惋惜的是，銀行業人士比音樂家更難養成這些習氣。
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