Harnessing the extraordinary power of data to drive positive change across the global financial services industry is today’s top priority. To achieve this, all parties must have fast, easy access to a single source of reliable, auditable information to create a more equitable, energy-efficient business environment. Using a tokenisation platform streamlines green bond issuance, heralding a new, more socially acceptable dawn for financial markets and their customers.
Green bonds have taken the market by storm and have grown exponentially in size and importance over the last 10 years. According to the report by the Climate Bonds Initiative, in Q3 of 2020 alone, some $70bn of green bonds were issued. The desire to build a sustainable offering around which a firm can emit bonds is therefore now an imperative.
GFT has established a formidable reputation as a pioneer in financial engineering innovation, consistently delivering modern technology solutions that supercharge positive change and business evolution for our clients. However, there are still far too many inflexible, historical, legacy-laden core systems in existence due to years of underinvestment. These systems are severely limiting the ability of firms to respond to rapidly changing market demands. In many cases, this also means many traditional service offerings are no longer fit for purpose and do not support the modern customer’s needs.
Today’s demanding consumers expect almost instant access to an ever-expanding array of modern, environmentally appropriate services, at a much lower cost. While this is a difficult situation, our clients are determined to re-establish their reputations as innovators by offering forward-thinking, ecologically friendly products. European regulation, such as the European Union’s taxonomy for sustainable activities, means that most financial firms and investment businesses are now prioritising the ecological impact of their investments, green bonds and other ecologically sustainable financial products.
To survive and prosper in this fast-changing, socially-conscious, data-centric world, financial firms must re-invent outdated technology environments to ensure their own sustainable future.
The growing importance of green bonds to the global business and consumer communities has further highlighted the shortcomings of existing systems. They have amplified the urgent need for a significant wholesale technology modernisation refresh, particularly for institutions looking to overhaul the preparation of debt request forms and their bond issuance process. Traditionally, they have relied on error-prone and highly inefficient systems, using the telephone, spreadsheets and a tsunami of emails, which is now an inefficient and unacceptable situation.
With a track record of delivering successful data-synchronised solutions, GFT has both the vision and experience to provide practical and cutting-edge solutions to complex business challenges. Alongside Digital Asset, we bring industrial strength experience in supporting distributed ledger technology/smart contract-driven corporate bonds and multi-bank/multi-institution green bond issuance at scale.
To find out more about GFT’s digital green bond issuance and our partnership with Digital Asset, download our thought leadership in full here.
David Creer is Global DLT and Crypto Lead at GFT.