In March 2020, the GDF Private Markets Digitalisation Steering Group convened financial institutions, leading tech companies and digital asset leaders to develop recommendations on digitising the process of investing in SMEs and improving accessibility through the implementation of an industry-wide digital securities network for private markets.
That year, the group published a proposal for a digital security network specification, which would be open to all regulated institutions; multi-vendor; ledger agnostic, and have open interfaces, known as FinP2P.
As FinP2P has developed, there have been many enhancements to support both ‘collateralisation’ of FinP2P assets for lending and borrowing, as well as the addition of ‘custody-as-a-service’ so that institutional custodians can provide services to other financial institutions on the network.
The custody service in FinP2P is a decentralised method that allows custodians to provide services to other FinP2P organisations by acting as the custodian for their investor’s digital assets. This service provides a secure and reliable system for the safekeeping of an investor’s financial assets, ensuring that investors’ assets are segregated, protected and managed in an efficient and transparent manner.
FinP2P also connects custodians with a single adapter, and interacts and provides information to the rest of the FinP2P network enabling interoperability. The new proposed model under the FinP2P custody messaging system aims to provide a common messaging format and framework. Each participant will have a ‘node’ within the system, under a licensing arrangement from FinP2P and other relevant technology users. The custodian’s role will be to hold the private key for updates to the ledger. Alternatively, the custodian may still act as the legal title holder of the asset.
It is of the opinion that custody under FinP2P is under current regulation in the UK & US.
The diagram below outlines the messaging system under the FinP2P network. For more details and to stay up to date with the Steering Group please visit the FinP2P Open-Source Specifications here.
