Digital-dollar pilots | Jennifer O’Rourke, DTCC

Episode 31 of DigFin VOX features Jennifer O’Rourke, head of digital design and innovation at DTCC, the Depository Trust Clearing Corporation. DTCC is responsible for the post-trade processing of securities in the U.S. and has been among the first financial institutions to experiment with blockchain and other technologies.

Following a series of pilots looking at private markets and digital assets, DTCC is now embarking on “Project Lithium”, to test how it would handle a digital dollar, should the Federal Reserve Bank mint its own digital currency.

O’Rourke spoke with DigFin’s Jame DiBiasio about the thinking behind DTCC’s projects, why it continues to support blockchain-based infrastructure, and how it regards some of the pioneering work in CBDCs being done in Asia.

• Timecodes:
• 0:00 – Jennifer O’Rourke, DTCC
• 1:10 – Impact of innovation on financial services
• 2:55 – Lessons from previous blockchain experiments
• 5:01 – Why blockchain technology?
• 7:19 – Project Lithium and supporting a digital dollar
• 9:10 – Versus modernizing America’s legacy infrastructure
• 12:33 – Industry demand for instant settlement
• 16:02 – What comes first, digital securities or digital cash?
• 19:20 – Interoperability among CBDCs and other assets
• 21:40 – Lessons from Asia’s pilots
• 24:29 – How to create standards with new tech
• 27:30 – Immutability, and public vs private chains
• 29:31 – Stablecoins and regulation
• 32:20 – How to measure Lithium’s success
• 25:42 – Is the US at risk of falling behind China?

(Note: at 9:20, DiBiasio references the U.S. moving from T+3 to T+2 settlement time. The U.S. is moving from T+2 to T+1.)