Microsoft will introduce Azure blockchain technology into the financial infrastructure of the Nasdaq Inc. stock exchange.
As part of the cooperation, companies will work on ensuring the interaction of technology with various distributed ledgers, streamlining the process of matching the applications for purchase and sale, as well as on improving the efficiency of payments and settlement of transactions.
“Our [capital markets] industry is evolving faster than ever with the advent and advancement of cloud, blockchain, machine intelligence and others. Key players in the industry are looking to these technologies to explore how they can become more effective and efficient, but also gain competitive advantage,” says Magnus Haglind, Senior Vice President and Head of Product Management for Nasdaq’s market technology business.
The press release also notes that Nasdaq released the Nasdaq Financial Framework (NFF) in 2016 to better serve its global customers. It is a technology that provides software for trade infrastructure, and in particular for transferring production or business processes from one company to another. The Framework’s modular design leverages a single operational core that powers a vast portfolio of business applications and services across the trading lifecycle.
NFF was also designed to take advantage of new technologies to provide key strategic benefits to customers. In turn, the integration of Azure blockchain solutions will enable NFF infrastructure users to deploy various distributed networks through a common interface, contributing to the advancement of technology.
Responsible for the development of corporate solutions, Senior Vice President of Enterprise Architecture at Nasdaq Tom Fay stressed that the partnership with Microsoft eliminates many of the difficulties associated with the integration of blockchain technologies in the financial infrastructure.
“With multiple blockchains in use by various industry participants, we believe that the combination of NFF and Microsoft’s blockchain technology can remove some of the project complexities that exist in this realm,” said Tom Fay.
Being the second largest stock exchange in the world, Nasdaq is actively developing in the direction of the blockchain. In September, for example, it became known that the exchange was working to create a tool for predicting the rate of digital currencies. The service uses machine learning and natural language processing algorithms to collect data on social networks and other sources of information and gives investors a more complete picture of possible market movements.
In the summer, Nasdaq talked about creating a blockchain-based platform for settling securities trading. The platform supports a distributed network of traders, brokers and intermediaries and will help to cover requests for the payment of additional funds from brokers.
A few days ago, Nasdaq received a patent for a blockchain system for publishing news. Smart contract technology will allow information to be distributed to specific recipients at a set time. Thus, according to the developers, the blockchain can be effectively used to automate the process of publishing information.
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