How traditional stock exchanges can reinvent themselves for the digital age
- Feb 16, 2022
- 1 min read
Updated: Apr 4, 2025
A Future of Finance interview with Angie Walker, Global Head of Capital Markets Business Development at R3.
Traditional stock exchanges are confronted by a classic Innovator’s Dilemma. They have the installed client base and the revenues to match. But if their digital challengers lack clients, they also benefit from nugatory costs and a new technology powerful enough to extend their reach into whole new classes of investors, issuers and assets. Faced by a potentially long transition to a totally new model in the capital markets, established exchanges know they must work out how and when to embrace change, and in particular when it makes sense to inter-operate with the blockchain-based platforms built by their competitors. Some are building digital exchanges of their own. Others are eyeing what might be available for purchase. Almost all have concluded that new technology can transform their post-trade costs, and it may well be that it is in the back office rather than the front where the true convergence of the old world and the new will begin. Dominic Hobson, co-founder of Future of Finance, asked Angie Walker, Global Head of Capital Markets Business Development at R3, how Corda is helping established as well as start-up exchanges to exploit the opportunities created by the digitisation of assets.
