New initiatives often give new hopes of solving longstanding problems. In the securities domain, there have been many complaints about the operational complexity and the high cost of post-trade processing, the business of making sure securities are transferred after a trade and the right payments are made to the right owners on time.

The two main causes of high costs are well known: different national market practices and insufficient competition among post-trade infrastructures. Tackling these root causes requires harmonisation and consolidation - the question is whether blockchain distributed ledger technology can be a catalyst for change.