The World Federation of Exchanges (WFE), the global trade association for the operators of regulated financial exchanges, last month announced its plans to set up a working group specifically focused on distributed ledger technology (DLT) and FinTech.

This was revealed by the WFE in its response to the UK Financial Conduct Authority's (FCA) Discussion Paper on Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT). The WFE said:

“The intention of this group is to share intelligence and best practice, develop standards and provide technical input to inform the WFE’s engagement with policymakers and regulators including, we hope, the FCA.”

Officially founded in London in 1961, the WFE represents more than 200 market infrastructure providers, of which more than 100 are Central Counterparties (CCPs) and Securities Depositories (CSDs). It said that its members are exploring how DLT can be applied to the exchange and CCP space to improve processes and efficiency.

In its response to the FCA, the WFE said that regulatory authorities must remain focused on ensuring investor protection and the safety of markets whilst enabling fintech innovation. With regard to DLT, it called for a “globally coherent approach”, in order to ensure a common approach that encourages innovation, maintains the resilience of the system, and safeguards a level playing field.

"Regulators can enable innovation while ensuring investor protection and the safety of markets. We also believe that the technology focus is widening beyond DLT and FinTech to areas such as cloud computing, AI, big data and robotics. The UK is amongst the global leaders in FinTech and the FCA itself has a track record of nurturing an innovation-friendly supervisory environment. As the global industry body for exchanges and post-trade infrastructure, the WFE therefore welcomes the opportunity to feed into the FCA's thinking on DLT,” Nandini Sukumar, CEO, WFE said.

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