MARKETNODE, the digital asset joint venture between Singapore Exchange (SGX) and Temasek, on Monday announced its partnership with 10 global financial institutions ahead of its upcoming product launches.

The partner institutions are Barclays, BNP Paribas, BNY Mellon, Citi, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Orient Securities International, Standard Chartered, Societe Generale and UOB.

These early adopters will work with Marketnode to accelerate usage of its platform, provide market input towards its product development, co-create distributed ledger technology (DLT) solutions and jointly explore product expansion beyond fixed income.

"As the bank focuses our efforts on leveraging technology to bring more innovative digital solutions and ESG (environmental, social and governance) products to our clients, this partnership with Marketnode will enable us to advance our agenda and contribute to the industry’s digitalisation journey," said Leng Hoe Lon, Standard Chartered's head of Singapore, Australia, Brunei financial markets, and head of Asean and South Asia macro trading.

UOB, the only South-East Asian bank among the partners, believes such strategic alliances will help support the development of digital capital market infrastructure and help the bank offer more progressive financing solutions across Asean. 

"UOB has been intensifying our efforts with regulators and industry partners across our network over the past few years to explore how digital ledger technology can benefit our clients and streamline legacy processes in capital markets. Our successful proof-of-concepts, including our participation in Project Ubin, demonstrate the value that DLT can bring to our corporate clients, such as improving cost and time efficiencies," said Frederick Chin, UOB's head of group wholesale banking.

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In a bourse filing on Monday, SGX said the upcoming product launches will be focused on digital issuance services, ESG bond data, and digital asset depository infrastructure.

These components, it added, will play a key role in building an end-to-end DLT-enabled fixed income infrastructure.

Marketnode's fixed income issuer services platform is slated to launch in Q4. It will rely on data analysis to provide issuers, law firms and banks with products and solutions such as documentation streamlining, investor engagement tools, ESG reporting and market access mechanisms.

"We continue to embrace the paradigm shift that the financial industry is undergoing with the emergence of new technologies," said Lee Beng Hong, SGX's head of fixed income, currencies and commodities (FICC). "By collaborating with banking and technology partners, we are creating network effects and building scale and capability that can be applied cross-assets within a single platform, for the benefit of banks, issuers and investors."

Said Pradyumna Agrawal, managing director of Blockchain@Temasek: "The participation of these banks onto the Marketnode platform is a significant milestone. It further validates the market for end-to-end infrastructure, and services for digital assets. Their contributions towards enhancing the platform's offerings and capabilities will be invaluable."

SGX said Marketnode will continue to work with partners and the industry to jointly create applications that bring greater efficiency to capital markets.

Marketnode earlier this year entered into a strategic collaboration with fixed income issuance and data company Covalent Capital. Since then, the parties have launched integrated offerings such as auto-ISIN generation and digital bond straight-through processing (STP).

Building on this, SGX said Marketnode will also be partnering Singapore-based fintech RootAnt Global and UK-based blockchain solution platform SETL to build its fixed income and multi-asset end-to-end infrastructure.

"Technology, digital platform, and collaboration are driving the next evolution in finance. Banks, non-bank financial institutions (NBFIs) and fintechs are forming partnerships and connecting ecosystems to make financial services intuitive, integrated and accessible. Fintechs such as RootAnt Global have to build and evolve our offerings to support our partners," said Lincoln Yin, founder and CEO of RootAnt Global.

Shares of SGX closed 0.6 per cent or S$0.06 higher at S$10.10 on Monday.