Capital Markets SIG Q1 & Q2 2021

Special Interest Group

Capital Markets Special Interest Group (CMSIG)

Report Author(s)

Vipin Bharathan: SIG Chair

CMSIG Overall Health

The CMSIG meetings are held every two weeks and are generally well-attended. Meeting topics and guest speakers drive attendance.  The Vice-chair Kirthi K  has been confirmed. Kirthi is the convener of our Insurance sub-group. 

Issues

We have a diverse set of members and have had success with well-attended presentations. We do have the challenge of gender and location diversity. There have been some improvements in location diversity.

Overall Activity in the Past Quarter

The CMSIG is very well attended. We have had thirteen meetings from Jan 1 until today (Jul-28-2021). We are in the vanguard of Capital Markets thought. The themes include all topical items in Capital markets namely CBDCs, FMI, DeFi, Tokenization, Automation etc.  CMSIG participation was also key in the cross-SIG TaskForce. eThaler and the use of ERC-1155 continues to find adherents in new projects like Firefly. Jagadeesh Babu, a key contributor to the eThaler project passed away due to Covid-19. His memory lives on in the eThaler project.   

• The Cambodian digital currency based on Iroha
• DXCD digital currency
• dFMI and woes of Robinhood
• Insurance Linked Securities & Tokenization
• Swiss DLT Law
• The beauty of ISO20022
• Operationalizing CBDCs
• Fnality: Towards a wholesale payment system
• FX remittances in the DeFi era
• Insurance Linked Securities and Ricardian Contracts
• Yield farming and AMM
• Smart Banknotes
• Warehouse Receipt Lending and NFTs

Planned Work Products

1. Presentations on various topics specific to Capital Markets SIG
2. Take part in Inter-SIG-WG collaboration
3. KYC/AML in custody, settlement, primary and secondary market trading.
4. Collaborate with other groups leveraging  eThaler code and sharing concerns with Capital Markets SIG, climate action SIG, public sector SIG, Trade Finance SIG and others.
5. Insurance sub-group - further growth toward AMM, DeFi and tokenization
6. Jumpstart more tokens and token definitions, contribute some ideas back into IWA.
7. Work on open source utility functions specific to Capital Markets for integration into smart contracts. For example bond math.
8. Interoperability work: extend xcsi and work on interoperability issues between different kinds of digital tokens and digital currencies.
9. Work with other open-source efforts like FinOS.
10. Digital exchanges (CeFi), execution, prefunded execution settlement, matching engine with D2D credit lines and off-exchange session based P2P settlement.

Participant Diversity

This is a very diverse membership with global representation (including, but not limited to, member participation from China, East and West Coast US, England, Canada, Switzerland, India, and the different countries within the EU). Gender diversity is still a challenge. We want to invite more presentations from women leaders in Capital Markets. We did open with a presentation from a woman and had a couple of women led presentations. Still 2 or 3 out of 13 is a dismal percentage and we need to improve.

Date Published

2021-07-28