Market Horizons podcast: Digital Bonds – are they the future of capital markets?

The Allen & Overy Podcast

In this episode of Allen & Overy’s Market Horizons podcast series, partners in A&O’s Debt Capital Markets team, Daniel Fletcher (London), Hervé Ekué (Paris), Salvador Ruiz (Madrid) and senior associate Philippe Noeltner (Luxembourg) look at what the future may hold for the capital markets. Together, they discuss Digital Bonds – which some are calling the future of debt capital markets – and look at some of the potential benefits and challenges of adopting these new structures.

Glossary:

• Digital Bond / Blockchain Bond - a wholly dematerialised bond that is issued, registered, settled, transferred and custodied natively using DLT.
• DLT / Distributed Ledger Technology - a set of protocols which enable data to be securely and accurately created and stored on a shared, de-centralised database, generally using cryptography. New information – representing records of transactions – is recorded on the distributed ledger only after validation by multiple computers (referred to as nodes) using a pre-agreed consensus mechanism.
• Blockchain - the most common example of DLT, and is so-called because each new transaction or bundle of transactions is recorded in a new ‘block’ of data which, once validated by the system, is added to the end of the existing sequential blocks of information (like adding links to a chain).