Citi has joined Credit Agricole in taking a minority stake in post-trade blockchain platform SETL.
SETL was launched in July 2015 to deploy a multi-asset, multi-currency institutional payment and settlements infrastructure based on blockchain technology.
The new investment in the firm comes just weeks after SETL went live with its pan-European funds record keeping platform IZNES having successfully processed its first transactions. The IZNES platform was launched in 2017 in partnership with four French asset managers.
Citi and Credit Agricole join Computershare, S2iEM and Deloitte as shareholders in the company.
Additionally, Computershare has increased its investment, and Stuart Irving, Group CEO of Computershare has joined the board.
Peter Randall, CEO of SETL, says: “We are pleased to announce that we have extended our shareholder register with both new and existing partners and have agreed the scope of a number of revenue generating projects."
SETL’s chairman, Sir David Walker, adds: "At this stage in the company’s development it is important to choose the right projects and to deliver a dependably resilient product to the market."
While neither Walker nor Randall provided any further details, it's reasonable to assume that the increased investment and oversight role adopted by Computershare may presage the live deployment of SETL's technology assets for the recording of share ownership. The Australian registrar established a joint project with SETL in April 2016 to explore the practicalities of establishing an immutable register of securities ownership using a permissioned ledger.