e-Forex-July-23-HighRes-SCREEN

THE E-FOREX INTERVIEW
Great teamwork in action - DMALINK® and DeFinity Markets
Greg Myers
the development and enhancement closely with the team to implement
of services specifically tailored strategic initiatives. Overall, my
for institutional clients, including role as a strategic advisor would
trading solutions, custody services, be to provide valuable expertise
liquidity management, and regulatory and strategic direction to help
compliance frameworks. Assisting the digital assets trading business
the team in terms of developing optimise its’ operations, navigate
new revenue lines with robust industry challenges, and capitalize
planning and effective controls is on opportunities for growth in the
key in my role. Performance Analysis institutional space.
has always been paramount to me
in monitoring and evaluating the Michael Idzkowski if we could
company’s performance metrics, bring you in here again. What
key performance indicators (KPIs), factors influenced the firms
and financial results. Identifying decision to move into the digital
areas for improvement and working asset space?
MI: Digital assets, and to take
a broader view, digitization and
tokenization of the financial markets
have already begun. We saw this
from bond issuances from several
large institutions, all the way up to
exchanges already trading some form
of digital assets. For us, it’s always a
question of ‘What is the problem?’. We
established four key considerations for
institutional market participants: AML/
KYC/KYT, counterparty risk, credit,
and capital efficiencies. The other
consideration we noticed was two
distinctive client camps, the crypto
natives and investment grade financial
institutions, which are interested
in participating but cannot due to
the earlier highlighted reasons. This
thought process instigated a chain
of events that led us to where we are
today.
Which client types does DeFinity
cater to?
MI: There will be two cohorts of clients
which will merge into one. First, we
have the fully regulated, investmentgrade
financial institutions such as
pension funds and asset managers
who already have credit lines in place
with various Prime Brokers who will
utilize DeFinity as the springboard to
enter the space. Through us, these
institutions will face a global tier 1
credit intermediary.
Ashwind Soonarane is COO of DMALINK
This means, issues around
counterparty risk, AML, and credit
largely disappear. Here we’re talking
about the large names who have been
given remits but are still quite docile,
given they cannot face sub-investment
grade counterparties. The second
client pool comprises pre-funded
participants who we’d categorise as
crypto natives. These counterparties
will be prioritized for engaging with
the investment-grade users when the
two systems begin to merge.”
50 JULY 2023 e-FOREX