The ISSA DLT Working Group has been at the forefront of the digital asset journey to help the Securities Services industry understand the latest trends, the evolution to expect in the future and to make sense of the practical considerations and challenges. ISSA’s aim is to shine a forward looking light on DLT through our thought leadership.

With this spirit, we partnered with the ValueExchange five years ago to create an industry survey to track the real-world evolution of DLT and digital assets from a market perspective. We are very excited to therefore be publishing the fifth of the ‘DLT In the Real-World Longitudinal Study’ series. The results here drive the DLT discussion in the Securities Services industry. This exciting new report brings even deeper insights than before and participation beyond the traditional banks and infrastructures in our industry.

Colin Parry, ISSA’s CEO, was at the PostTrade 360 conference in Stockholm in September where he had the pleasure of moderating a panel. To paraphrase one of the panellists “DLT is operating at scale in the financial markets now. I fail to understand why people do not think this is true. As with every technology, success happens by finding the right business case and deploying the right functionality. Look and you can see these cases on a daily basis."

The panel’s frustration came through in the discussion, but as well as triumphs there are challenges and this report shows both. There are a number of paths forward that the industry can take - across a number of asset classes - and the paths may have bumps and wrong turns, but value is already being extracted.

This is why ISSA has issued the DLT – Project Success paper. The aim is to help organizations understand the differences between DLT and classic Securities Services projects and ensure that the future deliveries have a greater chance to be successful.

We would like to thank the huge number of people and firms who participated in this report and provided their valuable input as well as our 2024 survey sponsors - Accenture, Broadridge and Ripple. We hope this report will not only be insightful to you but also help you benchmark your organization's DLT and digital asset journey compared to the industry’s trajectory. As we continue to move forward the Working Group’s agenda, we look forward to working with you to use the insights from this report to drive further thought leadership and industry engagement via the new ISSA Evolving Technologies in Securities Services working group.