Barclays Hackathon to Attack Data 'Silos' With Blockchain

Barclays is holding another hackathon to tackle the financial services industry's perennial problem of systems that don't talk to each other.

Can be implemented using various programming languages and applied to a range of platforms, including blockchain and distributed ledger technology.

In addition to ISDA, Barclays has assembled a range of partners to support the hackathon, including the likes of R3 for Corda platform support and Digital Asset for DAML programming support.

Sunil Challa from the Business Architect team at Barclays talked through some of the philosophy behind the event, pointing out that product classes within financial services have evolved organically over time and so banks, buy-side firms and utilities had to support the growth through product-specific solutions.

Challa said the hackathon will also help Barclays evaluate the CDM against their internal models and weigh up variations such as applications using CDM natively, shared repositories of data in CDM format, and even hybrid models.

Dr. Lee Braine from the Chief Technology and Innovation Office at Barclays said that staff from across the bank were supporting the event, bringing together its strategy, business architecture, technology, innovation, and delivery teams.

This even included a Barclays summer intern writing a program to generate the test trades that will be used as input data by the hackathon participants.

"They constructed a market model with corresponding business process, use cases and test data in order to allow hackathon participants to work on challenges that are truly at the leading edge of best practice thinking," Braine said.

The idea behind the ISDA CDM, said Braine, is to establish a common standard for post-trade business logic and data that is agnostic of any specific technology, permitting the standard to be implemented in potentially any programming language on any platform.

"Once you get agreement on the event processes and data structures, that solves most of the problem. The next question is then around which platform and which programming language - well that's a key point of the hackathon."