New and Groundbreaking Platform that Digitalises Trading of Non-Listed Company Shares

We are excited to be part of a new and innovative project that opens up significant opportunities for digitalising the trading of non-listed shares. Five leading Finnish financial and IT industry players have come together to create a platform based on distributed ledger technology that will provide a reliable, simple and digital way of processing primary and secondary market transactions and share register data. This will create significant efficiency gains and growth opportunities for companies and enable a seamless flow of information by bringing both private sector companies and public authorities together as part of the same process.

The founding parties’ intention is to build a geographically highly scalable platform, but will be scaling in Finland first. The platform is based on open source Corda and Hyperledger Indy distributed ledger technologies. This newly developed distributed ledger based business network is currently at a proof-of-concept stage, and the plan is to start customer piloting sometime in 2019.

“Applying distributed ledger technology in a highly regulated business context provided us with an inspiring challenge to change our perspective and has led to a demand to re-allocate certain roles and related rights and obligations in a new way. I was impressed by the pace at which the working group was able to conclude critical design choices and develop the required functionalities between sprints during the proof-of-concept phase. I look forward to the next phase of the project and the digitalisation of the end-to-end processes of non-listed company shares,” says Jorma Yli-Jaakkola, Counsel at Borenius and the Borenius lead on the project.

It is worth mentioning that this platform was fully developed in Finland by a consortium consisting of Asiakastieto Group, Nordea, OP Financial Group, Privanet Group Oyj and Tieto. Our role as the consortium’s legal advisor was to advise on business, legal and governance compliance. Other advisors that contributed to the development of the platform were the Finnish Tax Administration and the Finnish Patent and Registration Office.

“We were delighted to have Borenius as our legal advisor on a project that involves critical legal and regulatory matters. The project applied the Agile Method, and it was essential to have a legal advisor capable of finding innovative solutions already during the workshops. Mr Yli-Jaakkola’s extensive regulatory and business experience from capital markets, his deep understanding of distributed ledger technologies and his solution-oriented approach were critical to the success of the project,” concludes Markus Hautala, the Head of Blockchain Solutions at Tieto.

This project fully represents our mission and our passion to find the best solutions for our clients.

”Our involvement in this project was another great materialisation of our mission at Borenius, which is to help our clients shape our common business landscape. We look forward to engaging in further opportunities, which pioneer in the cross-roads of regulation and new technologies, such as distributed ledger technologies and blockchain,” says Samuli Simojoki, Head of Technology, Media & Telecommunications practice at Borenius.

For further information, see Tieto’s press release.