Up until 1973 Scotland had its own independent stock exchange, the Scottish Stock Exchange, born from a merger of the Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee and Aberdeen Stock Exchanges in 1964. But the doors were slammed shut when it was officially merged with the London Stock Exchange in 1973 and all operations were moved to London.
With the Scots getting more wary of staying in the United Kingdom due to the vote of the English in the south to leave the EU via a Brexit, a new group of Blockchain and financial experts in Scotland have begun work on SCOTEX a Blockchain driven trading platform built from scratch from the ground up as an entirely new exchange they say can bring about real innovation to the equity capital market. Scotex is seeking to raise as much as 15 million pounds ($18.4 million) to start a regulated equity market next year, according to a statement last week.
From the website.
We can bring profound change to the post-trade landscape through distributed ledgers thereby slashing settlement times and bringing significant cost benefits to all exchange participants. Every exchange in the world is looking at implementing this technology but they all face the intractable problem of switching from legacy systems on to very new and very different post-trade infrastructure. Without that problem to overcome SCOTEX can genuinely be the first in the world at implementing distributed ledger technology with the STARS system.
SCOTEX will offer capital markets access for the next generation of scientists, inventors and entrepreneurs of Scotland. It is crucial for Scotland that its wealth creators – now and in the future – have a visible equity capital market that is able to provide them with access to the capital they need to grow their companies.
They are calling the new post-trade system STARS: Secure Transaction Affirmation and Reporting System. It will mean:
- Trades will settle almost immediately with no need for post-trade clearing (guaranteeing) of trades.
- Trading will be much cheaper for everyone as users will be charged a low flat fee to access the ledger rather than being charged per transaction in a captive system.
- Sellers will get their money almost instantly and no later than 15 minutes after executing a stock sale.
- No need for post-trade affirmation or confirmation and central clearing during the settlement cycle.
- Reduced scope for data errors, disputes and reconciliation lags, speeding up the end-to-end trading process since all participants operate from their own local version of the golden source.
