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In a new article for Waters Technology, Dr Ian Hunt suggests that the financial service industry may be heading for its own ‘Kodak’ moment, as a result of its failure to recognise the new business model offered by digitisation. The industry in the UK, US and Europe sees distributed ledger / blockchain technology as something that is just a slightly smarter way of doing exactly what it....

In a recent edition of DigitalBytes, Dr Ian Hunt explores the sources of complexity in our current operating models and regulations, and proposes how these may be directly addressed through digital issuance. The article explains how our multiple asset classes, with their separate operating models, entities, processes and regulations, create unnecessary complexity that can be collapsed into a singl....

A major new paper from Dr Ian Hunt on the Smart Token Model for Native Digital Assets has been published in the November 2023 edition of the Capco Journal of Financial Transformation. This is a bi-annual collection of serious papers on innovation in financial services. The paper sets out the smart token model, articulates its benefits for investment, capital markets and funds, and demonstrates tha....

The smart token model offers substantial benefits across the spectrum of investment activity, including securitisation and securities financing. Securities Finance Times published two papers by Dr Hunt, applying smart tokens, and the single digital issuance and operating model to repo, lending and collateral. The first article provided a short summary of native digital assets and smart tokens, and....

The second article from Dr Hunt addressed repo, lending and collateral specifically, and showed how the smart token model would simplify and accelerate securities financing operations. Native Digital Assets - Securities Finance Times Issue 327