At Sibos earlier today, a panel explored the interoperability of digital asset and DLT systems. Yesterday Swift, the organizer of the conference, unveiled its own plans for a shared ledger in which it sees itself as a neutral enabler of interoperability.
John Whelan from Santander started the discussion by noting that nobody designed the global financial system. It emerged organically, evolving into what he describes as “hundreds, thousands, millions of record keeping systems, ledgers, databases” that fundamentally don’t interoperate with each other. The result is a massive infrastructure of messaging layers, reconciliation processes, and auditing mechanisms built simply to verify that one institution’s ledger matches another’s.
“The macro opportunity is really to re-architect the entire financial system from the ground up,” Whelan told the panel. By upgrading to ledgers with cryptographically verifiable state, these systems could finally synchronize and interoperate directly. Abeetha Pitigala from Goldman Sachs sees the transformation centered on post-trade operations, an area that hasn’t fundamentally changed in decades. “DLTs have come along over the last 15 years and have now shifted that whole balance sheet reconciliation aspect of things,” he explained.
Yet as the panel made clear, this vision carries a paradox. The industry now faces multiple competing platforms, each built on different ledgers. Jack Pouderoyen from Swift noted the challenge: market participants must decide which initiatives to invest in, which to participate in, and which to ignore. “If you participate in every single thing that comes across, you have a full time job of just trying to connect to all these different things,” he said. “And then you have this world of fragmented liquidity.” The original vision risks being undermined by the very proliferation it enabled.
