Wall Street firms back DLT-based system for alternative assets

Wall Street players including BlackRock, Morgan Stanley and State Street are backing a new consortium led by iCapital that will build a distributed ledger-based system for alternative assets.

The partners say that creating a secure, shared, auditable record for each alternative investment will augment the efficiency of the investment creation, management, and exit processes, eliminating the need for each party to take in data, reconcile it to their records and share new versions of the data with others.

“The value in a private, permissioned, distributed ledger solution is that it creates one single golden source of data – eliminating the need for multiple reconciliations, allowing all the parties in a transaction to read from and write to the same record,” says Tom Fortin, CIO, iCapital.

Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, BNY Mellon, Carlyle, KKR, Morgan Stanley, State Street, UBS and WestCap are the first to join the consortium, with iCapital predicting more to follow.

Todd Myers, COO, private wealth solutions, Blackstone, says: “With this next generation of technology, we are committed to optimizing the entire alternative investing experience so that advisors and their clients can meet their needs with efficiency and ease.”