SETL Completes Initial Funding and Announces Board Appointments

SETL.com – London – SETL, the London based institutional payment and settlement infrastructure based on blockchain technology, announced the completion of its first round of private fundraising today.

SETL also announced additional appointments to its board. Rachel Lomax, former Deputy Governor of the Bank of England and Ed Richards, former CEO of Ofcom, join the SETL board, following the appointment of Sir David Walker as SETL Chairman in December 2015. The company will also shortly announce the name of a further appointment to the Board, who is an experienced executive board member and non-executive in government, including at agencies in the national security sector.

SETL was launched in July 2015 to deploy a multi-asset, multi-currency institutional payment and settlements infrastructure based on blockchain technology. The SETL system will enable market participants to move cash and assets directly between each other, facilitating the immediate and final settlement of market transactions. The SETL system maintains a permissioned distributed ledger of ownership and transaction records, simplifying the process of matching, settlement, custody, registration and transaction reporting.

Since launch, SETL announced a breakthrough in technology, allowing the platform to process over 1.4bn transactions per day; launched their blockchain-powered OpenCSD platform, enabling market participants to run permissioned registry service for payments, settlement and clearing of cash and other financial instruments; and demonstrated Australia’s first working blockchain solution in collaboration with Computershare.

SETL’s Chairman, Sir David Walker, said: “This is a milestone in the development of SETL and one which I believe strengthens the company’s position significantly. At this stage in the company’s growth it is important to choose the right partners and to deliver a dependably resilient product to the market.”

Sir David Walker continued: “We are also delighted to confirm further appointments to the board. Joining as non-executives are Rachel Lomax and Ed Richards. Each of these directors brings a wealth of experience in the financial, regulatory and corporate governance spheres. Their oversight of the growth and development of SETL will be invaluable to the executive team and shareholders alike”. SETL is very mindful of the dependability and resilience of its systems and interfaces and we are delighted to welcome a further colleague to add counsel to the board, regulators, customers and shareholders.

Peter Randall, CEO of SETL, added: “We are pleased to announce that we have closed fundraising with initial partners and have agreed scope on a number of projects. With the recent announcement of our OpenCSD product, the completion of the funding arrangements and our board appointments, I am excited about developments ahead.

We believe we have a technological lead in this area having demonstrated the ability to process billions of transactions a day and are unique in having a financial grade product on the shelf and ready to go. We have already received significant indications of interest in the OpenCSD product and are in the process of choosing the initial implementation cases”.

Randall concluded: “I do not underestimate the challenges of re-tooling some of the most fundamental elements of our financial infrastructure but the benefits of doing so are significant and widespread. We are strongly positioned to commence that transformation and look forward to making further announcements shortly.”