FIMAS Blockchain Working Group Experiments with Smart Contracts

The financial industry is in intense discussion whether Blockchain is going to be the next “big thing” – will it enable a revolution of the industry akin to what the Internet has done to media and commerce since the 1990s? Or will it fail because integration with the “real world” and legacy systems is too slow and costly?

For our own research, FIMAS in 2015 set up a working group of business analysts and developers to investigate the new technology. We started with the bitcoin blockchain and eventually moved on to smart contracts on distributed ledgers. As part of a workshop in May, our team developed a simple smart contract which it has now made available on GitHub.

Smart contracts are essentially autonomous applications, deployed to a distributed ledger, that can automatically enforce contracts based on parameters contained therein. They are tamper-proof as the contract, all its parameters and indeed business logic are distributed throughout the Blockchain. If designed properly, they do not necessarily require clearing and settlement institutions for fulfillment. In our example we designed a simple index certificate in which payment flows are auto-executed based on the underlying index value at a given point in time. Naturally, our goal here was limited to tinker with the concept and technology in order to better understand it. We gained valuable insight by identifying and discussing all sorts of questions related to smart contracts: While it is easy to program business logic and a multitude of validations, the real issues to address concern “real world” integration. Here, we made good progress using the sample smart contract as basis for discussion.

Our experimental smart contract was written in "Solidity", the scripting language used by Ethereum. As we were learning from other Ethereum-based open source projects, we made the results of our workshop available on GitHub (https://github.com/FimasDevelopment/IndexCertificate.

The FIMAS team is convinced that a significant amount of business and technological expertise is required for a deep understanding of the blockchain and its potential applications. Leveraging our 400+ manyears of expertise in financial markets business and technology we will continue our exercise in research and knowledge building, adding value for our clients seeking advise in whether, where and how to use the distributed ledger technology.

About FIMAS
FIMAS is a team of Business Analysts, Project Managers, Software Developers and Testers for the global financial markets industry. Our consultants are experts in the technology that drives the financial markets, including electronic trading, front-, middle-, back-office systems and risk management. www.fimas-consulting.com

FIMAS Consulting
Steffen Rein
Mergenthalerallee 45-47
65067 Eschborn
Germany
+49 (0)6196 524 9111

This release was published on openPR.