Yesterday the SIX Digital Exchange (SDX) announced that Liechtenstein’s Kaiser Partner Privatbank is the latest member of the SDX Central Securities Depositary (CSD). SDX is a FINMA-registered central securities depositary for tokenized digital assets and also operates a regulated exchange. Kaiser joins four Swiss banks, UBS, Credit Suisse, Zürcher Kantonalbank and Berner Kantonalbank, that are already CSD members.
“Our existing services for intermediaries are a key element in meeting our clients’ complex financial needs, as they enable clients to finance investments or make trading of illiquid assets possible,” said Christian Reich, CEO of Kaiser Partner Privatbank. “SDX’s CSD offering will help us to meet these needs even better by improving efficiency throughout the investment process.”
SDX has two arms, a web3 one that focuses on crypto and another that targets the issuance and trading of digital securities, which is where Kaiser comes in.
To date, four securities have been issued, with the highlight being a CHF 300 million digital bond issuance by UBS. It was novel because it linked the conventional SIX CSD to the SDX CSD, enabling organizations not set up for blockchain-based securities to hold them nonetheless. That’s despite distributed ledger being the primary method of record-keeping for the UBS issuance.
This year SDX has been involved in a CHF 100 million bond issuance for the City of Lugano, which was approved for the Swiss National Bank (SNB) general collateral basket so that it can be used for repos. Additionally, SDX received clearance from regulator FINMA to issue euro-denominated digital bonds.
