Barclays is holding one other hackathon to deal with the monetary companies trade’s perennial problem of programs that don’t talk to each other. Once once more, blockchain will take middle stage.
The second annual DerivHack 2019 will happen October 16-17 in Barclays’ Rise accelerator areas in London and New York, websites of final 12 months’s 48-hour coding marathon, and within the megabank’s Singapore workplace this time as properly. The occasion is outgrowing its title, as equities and bonds will likely be added to the combo of monetary devices concerned.
As in earlier years, the goal of the hackathon is to discover methods the International Swaps and Derivatives Association’s (ISDA) Common Domain Model (CDM) may be carried out utilizing numerous programming languages and utilized to a spread of platforms, together with blockchain and distributed ledger know-how (DLT).
About 50 groups of 4 coders every, representing banks, monetary infrastructure suppliers and monetary know-how companies, will compete to supply the very best options. There will likely be 4 to 6 judges at every of the three areas, comprising senior representatives from Barclays, different banks, market infrastructures, commerce associations, and universities. Three prizes will likely be awarded at every of the three areas for first, second and third place.
In addition to ISDA, Barclays has assembled a spread of companions to assist the hackathon, together with the likes of R3 for Corda platform assist and Digital Asset for DAML programming assist. Other companions embody DBS Bank in Singapore, U.S. central securities depository DTCC, the International Capital Market Association (ICMA), and REGnosys, a post-trade platform tailor-made to the CDM. Plus, Big Four audit agency EY will produce an impartial report on the occasion. Teams seeking to take part can enroll here.
Sunil Challa from the Business Architect staff at Barclays talked by way of among the philosophy behind the occasion, stating that product lessons inside monetary companies have developed organically over time and so banks, buy-side companies and utilities needed to assist the expansion by way of product-specific options.
Challa informed CoinDesk:
“The idea is to demonstrate through the CDM that these [products] can actually co-mingle and a standard can cut across them to direct the industry in terms of cross-asset, cross-product solutions rather than siloed investments.”
Challa stated the hackathon may also assist Barclays (and different banks) consider the CDM in opposition to their inside fashions and weigh up variations similar to purposes utilizing CDM natively, shared repositories of information in CDM format, and even hybrid fashions.
“The hackathon is like a capsule of accelerated industry feedback, achieving in two intense days what may otherwise take years to occur organically,” he stated.
Lingua franca
Dr. Lee Braine from the Chief Technology and Innovation Office at Barclays stated that employees from throughout the financial institution had been supporting the occasion, bringing collectively its technique, enterprise structure, know-how, innovation, and supply groups. This even included a Barclays summer time intern writing a program to generate the take a look at trades that will likely be used as enter information by the hackathon members.
“They constructed a market model with corresponding business process, use cases and test data in order to allow hackathon participants to work on challenges that are truly at the leading edge of best practice thinking,” Braine stated
Teams will likely be free to decide on no matter know-how platform they like (not solely those supporting the occasion) and this may also inform the types of languages they may choose, he stated. For occasion, individuals could need to use Java or Kotlin to code workflows on Corda.
Or they could select DAML to code rights and obligations in a domain-specific language, working at a excessive stage of abstraction that would even be impartial of whether or not there occurs to be a distributed ledger or a centralized database beneath. Alternatively, groups may go for one other blockchain platform, similar to Hyperledger Fabric or ethereum, or a extra conventional software program stack.
“There are pros and cons with all programming languages and platforms, and we think it will be the same here. Factors are likely to include the speed of development; the elegance and simplicity of the solution, understandability, robustness, and so on.”
The concept behind the ISDA CDM, stated Braine, is to determine a typical normal for post-trade enterprise logic and information that’s agnostic of any particular know-how, allowing the usual to be carried out in doubtlessly any programming language on any platform.
Since many banks are in search of third get together utilities to tackle extra post-trade processing duties, the extra standardization that may be delivered to the area, the higher, he stated, concluding:
“Once you get agreement on the event processes and data structures, that solves most of the problem. The next question is then around which platform and which programming language – well that’s a key point of the hackathon.”
Barclays pic: Shutterstock
Comments