New York, November’19: Brillio, a global digital consulting and technology services company, announced that it won two awards at the recently concluded Barclays DerivHack Hackathon 2019 at New York.

Barclays along with ISDA (International Swaps and Derivatives Association) hosted a Hackathon (DerivHack 2019) to address key issues in the derivatives market where over time, the financial firm have established systems with their own unique representations for events and processes that occur during the derivatives trade lifecycle. This has resulted in firms having to continually reconcile their trades to make sure they have the same information – a big drain on resources.

ISDA introduced a Common Domain Model (CDM) that targets towards a golden source of trade data and enables innovation in financial markets through distributed ledgers, machine readable and executable formats aided by AI thereby enabling better regulatory oversight and transparency through alignment between regulators and market participants.

Participants were challenged to show how Common Domain Model (CDM) can be implemented across a variety of platforms and simulate the interaction model among the common repository, broker-dealers and clients. Demonstrate efficient orchestration of security transactions, post trade processing and the servicing of client portfolios across a total of 7 use cases starting from trade execution, allocation, affirmation till posting collaterals.

The Win

Brillio competed with teams including Accenture, TCS, Bank of America, Barclays, Chatham Financial, etc. in this 48-hours hackathon and was the first team to present the solution to judges.

Of all the teams in the event, only Brillio, Bank of America and Barclays could complete all the 7 use cases and Brillio won two awards of the total 5 awards announced:

1. Completeness and Best CDM adoption
2. Best team name award

Brillio’s Hack

Brillio came up with a Smart Trading Platform that offers an end-to-end integrated solution to client, counterparty or a broker-dealer with a separate view for each of the users to describe multi-party workflows and automate transactions between them. We leveraged various market tools to enhance the capabilities of the platform, including authentication & authorization, FINRA BrokerCheck to validate broker-dealers, IPFS for safe & secure sharing of data in a distributed system, Notifications to trigger an alert on status change & pending actions, Reporting to share downloadable reports for regulatory compliance. These ad-on features proved to be unique differentiator for us.

We chose DAML as our smart contract and DLT platform because CDM & DAML proved to be a perfect combination for standardizing the market. DAML expresses contracts, parties, rights, obligations, and authorization directly, which means programmers are free to focus on getting their business logic right, rather than how to encode these ideas as lower level machine constructs. We also leveraged DAML’s locking pattern which allows the specified locking party to lock the asset through an active and authorized action.

Key Takeaways

• We got an in-depth understanding & experience of working on ISDA CDM while solving the use cases
• DAML compliments ISDA CDM with its expressive language making it easier to define the business logic while automatically checking the code for problems involving rights, obligations, and lack of authority
• The solution developed during the hackathon can be used by various financial institutions to have a common digital representation of trade lifecycle across blockchain
• Blockchain in trade lifecycle can drastically reduce costs and improve the efficiency of back-office processes