Data

Tata Consultancy Services announced the general availability of Quartz for Markets, designed to help Market Infrastructure Institutions (MIIs) such as exchanges, depositories, central banks, payment infrastructures, private banks, custodians and issuers, offer end-to-end next generation services around tokenized securities, and drive their future growth.

Quartz for Markets builds on TCS’ position as the largest independent software provider to MIIs, with its proven TCS BaNCS for Market Infrastructure and Custody solutions powering the operations of over 50 market-critical institutions across 66 countries. The new solution helps MIIs leverage blockchain technology to offer next-generation services around tokenized securities, such as KYC/AML, token issuance, order management, matching, atomic settlement, crypto custody, digital asset servicing, general meeting services and trade surveillance.

The new solution provides out-of-the-box support for multiple asset classes, including equity, fixed income, warrants, and asset-backed tokens like real estate, gold, art, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as well as loyalty points. Investors can benefit from a choice of settlement in fiat currencies, cryptocurrencies, stable coins and digital currencies, thus gaining from both liquidity and flexibility.

Quartz for Markets is available on-premise as well as on cloud, and has been designed for easy integration and interoperability with existing core platforms and third-party solutions. It can work with public as well as private blockchain platforms and supports multiple token standards such as ERC and R3 Token SDKs. The solution includes an intuitive, low code development kit, with which it can be extended to meet the MII’s future needs. Four MII’s have already signed up for Quartz for Markets, and deployment is currently underway.

“Tokenization democratizes access to assets by turning material as well as digital assets into tokens that can be traded at a fraction of the current cost. This represents an opportunity for MIIs to launch innovative new services around tokenized assets, attract new classes of investors and drive growth,” said R Vivekanand, Global Head, Quartz, TCS. “Quartz for Markets is a robust, secure and future-proof solution that can support the end-to-end transaction life cycle and instant settlement for a wide range of tokenized assets, including NFTs, which are gaining in popularity and value. We have leveraged our contextual knowledge and extensive industry experience in capital markets to design a solution that seamlessly serves the needs of a broad spectrum of market players and accelerates their growth and transformation journeys.”

Following the launch, TCS has also announced that Quartz has successfully integrated its ledger management solutions with Thales to provide customers with best-in-class security for custody, trading and settlement transactions across a diverse range of crypto and digital assets.

While crypto and digital assets are fueling the creation of a tokenized economy, secure custody of these assets continues to be an area of concern in the face of an explosion of digital threats and the risk of theft.

Quartz leverages Thales Luna Hardware Security Modules that provide secure encryption, signing and authentication services to protect cryptographic keys against compromise.

Targeted at banks, brokers, custodians, marketplaces, and investors in a diverse range of digital assets, the enhanced Quartz will enable robust security, trust and governance and the end-to-end management of digital assets. With these fully automated and highly secure authentication services, wallet service providers, token and crypto exchanges and marketplaces can customize authentication to meet their unique needs. Quartz solutions leverage Thales’ FIPS140-2 Level-3 certified HSMs to safeguard critical operations including address generation, encoding, and transaction signing in a secure device, delivering a multi layered governance model to ensure safety and resilience in digital asset transactions.

“We have been making continuous investments in our Quartz solutions to provide best-in-class, enterprise grade security features to our clients. The enhanced solution will help fast-track our customers’ journeys into the crypto/tokenized economy in a secure manner. Wallets store private keys that are used to digitally sign transactions, and their application goes beyond the trustless economy – for self-sovereign identity, enabling restricted access to private information including medical information, vaccination status, educational records among others,” said R Vivekanand, Global Head, Quartz, TCS. “Our collaboration with Thales will offer purpose-driven solutions that can deliver the comfort of enterprise-class security and create compelling value for our customers.”

Todd Moore, Vice President, Encryption Products, Thales, said, “We are delighted with the successful integration of Thales with Quartz solutions, which will help organizations in extending their product portfolio to the exciting world of crypto and digital fungible and non-fungible assets. The integrated offering with Quartz enables trust by protecting keys that are the bedrock of digital tokens representing goods, financial assets and securities.”