Securrency has created powerful regtech and fintech infrastructure technology that delivers unmatched multi-jurisdictional identity and compliance portability across distributed ledgers and existing networks through a powerful asset creation framework. Securrency delivers to financial institutions and their clients the convenient compliance tools and true interoperability among legacy and blockchain systems necessary for global adoption of digital assets.

Thought leader
Dan Co-Founded Securrency in 2015. He serves as Chief Executive Officer and Lead Architect of Securrency’s comprehensive, cutting-edge technology. Dan is a recognized expert in software development, artificial intelligence, process automation, cybersecurity, dynamic asset pricing, and enterprise architecture. Dan served as the Chief Innovation Officer of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency and is the recipient of the 2014 Fierce 15 award as a top government change agent.

While working for the government Dan oversaw:

• Design and development of cross-agency automated identity-proofing system
• Developed DHS’ cloud strategy and migrated its legacy systems to a PaaS platform
• Led development of a secure, real time information exchange across global DoD networks

Education: Dan holds degrees from the U.S. Naval Academy and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Q&A with Dan Doney

How is DLT and Blockchain reshaping wealth and asset management? Where is the industry today and how do you foresee things changing in the future?
The complexities of modern-day finance have created a fertile environment for the development of innovative, tech-driven solutions that not only address compliance challenges but open up new opportunities for capital formation and liquidity. Financial institutions, faced with heightened regulatory requirements and overly stressed decades-old financial infrastructures, are saddled with spiraling legal and IT costs to maintain inefficient and incredibly costly systems that, in many cases, suck the lifeblood out of a firm’s ability to adapt to outside forces and expand into new, alternative channels in the pursuit of value for their clients and themselves.

As the financial services ecosystem continues to shift from analog processes and services to more powerful digital services, the potential and promise of distributed ledger technology to address a highly fragmented and inefficient ecosystem and to open up new markets and services is turning into reality. We are far beyond simply studying the technology’s purported benefits and have entered a new phase in which firms around the world are actively deploying this technology to address significant pain points across the value chain. From onboarding, to distribution, to identity and privacy, to security, and to compliance, firms, including those in the wealth management space, are seeing firsthand the opportunities presented by blockchain technology

Compliance and interoperability, two massive and significant barriers to institutional adoption from the outset, are now capable of being addressed. In doing so, previously siloed ledgers and systems can be bridged with new, innovative infrastructures to provide an easy onramp for financial institutions to create new forms of finance, connect to new customers, and unlock previously illiquid markets.

Similarly, a fragmented, multi-jurisdictional regulatory environment has presented significant challenges in view of one of the key characteristics of today’s technology: its borderless nature. That challenge, too, is being addressed head-on. Through tokenization of assets, the financial instrument itself can be programmable and embedded with self-enforcing rulesets that allow this asset to respect and respond to regulations across multiple jurisdictions so that transfer of value, whatever it is and whatever form it takes, will remain compliant with local regulation no matter where the underlying activity takes place.

In essence, the two largest inhibitors to institutional adoption in this space are now being addressed. This, in turn, opens up substantial opportunities for wealth managers to expand their customer base, create new products and services, and develop or partake in vibrant, deeply, and liquid markets on a global scale. The possibilities stemming from these developments are remarkable.

But the possibilities enabled by distributed ledger technology can be stifled, especially in a situation where one ledger, or infrastructure, purports to be the locus of all activity in a self-contained environment. This sort of approach makes adoption a binary choice instead of allowing legacy systems and a wide range of new networks and technologies to seamlessly interact with each other. A centralized, monolithic “walled-garden” structure may restrict a wealth manager’s ability to access certain markets and unlock liquidity, and this may also give rise to significant privacy and security concerns. As such, it is incumbent upon wealth management firms and the financial services ecosystem, more generally, to support an open, decentralized framework that allows for optionality and choice while preserving the movement of value across myriad systems.

Wealth managers would be wise to embrace this new technology, pursue tokenization of assets, and interconnect with new pools of global liquidity that are enabled by digitalization of assets. However, they should also be prudent in selecting systems and technology partners that provide for universal access and long-term optionality.

What solution(s) does your company offer that wealth and asset management firms should consider?
The future of digital finance rests on interoperability and compliance. Securrency has recognized from the very beginning that the key to transforming today’s financial services ecosystem and unlocking the potential of digital assets, rests on optimizing financial logistics through the creation of a multi-jurisdictional compliance framework. The seamless automation of cross-border compliance can foster an environment that provides for the seamless bridging of assets to payments, the seamless chaining of transactions across diverse systems, and the seamless linking of liquidity pools around the world. Through this powerful technology framework, Securrency offers multiple avenues for wealth managers to grow their customer base, and promote, create, and distribute new products and services without running afoul of multijurisdictional regulatory requirements.

The key attributes of Securrency’s technology are:

Digital Asset Composer: Through a plain-language interface and leveraging object-based tools, issuers, financial services providers, lawyers, and other professionals can rapidly create any type of financial instrument, apply self-governing rulesets using the Policy Engine, equip the instrument with realtime data feeds using the Attestation Registry, and deploy this asset on virtually any blockchain with full interoperability with other blockchains and legacy systems.

Policy Engine: This tool provides authorized persons with a plain language interface that allows the user to build and codify rulesets for tokenized asset tailored to the jurisdiction(s) in which the token will be issued, offered, or traded. The Policy Engine not only provides the authorized user with a flexible, efficient way of defining the regulatory and transactional parameters applicable to that asset, but also allows for dynamic updates to those tokens if these rules change. The Policy Engine also provides an audit trail of any changes to the regulatory wrapper around the token and the individual(s) who authorized and implemented the changes.

Attestation Registry: This powerful oracle provides certified and auditable third party identity, regulatory, and transactional data (e.g., pricing feeds) input to on-chain smart contracts.

Digital Asset Registry: This is a user-friendly interface connecting to Securrency’s core back-end services that can be used by issuers, broker-dealers, and transfer agents to perform the following functions in support of digital assets created with the Securrency tokenization framework:

• Cap Table/Registry Management
• Shareholder Communications
• Shareholder Proxy Voting
• All Transactions Report per Asset
• Mint token based on tranche or strategy (CATF-20, CATF-721, etc.)
• Asset Operation Setup (Payments, Trades, Trustlines, etc.)

Through the Digital Asset Registry portal, dynamic policy updates can be applied through the Securrency Policy Engine to record and automate regulatory changes and modifications to digital asset structure and rules (e.g., dividends, refinancings, payments, etc.)

The combination of these powerful capabilities provides wealth managers with easy-to-use tools to create, distribute, manage, buy, and sell digital assets in a highly customizable, interoperable, and transparent manner.

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