ASMX launch delayed
Blockchain-based secondary market platform ASMX has seen its launch delayed after encountering a technological issue that is now being fixed.
ASMX, which aims to boost liquidity for investors, was originally set to launch in mid-March, before the roll-out was delayed until the end of June. Issues have been encountered that are now being resolved.
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David Bradley-Ward (pictured), chief executive of ASMX and asset-backed peer-to-peer lending platform Ablrate, said there are a lot of complexities involved in transactions on platforms, such as a confirmation of trades, updating PDF documents and uploading financial statements.
He said these can lead to synchronicity problems if the platform and ASMX work at different speeds, which would happen because ASMX can settle a transaction in two tenths of a second, whereas Ablrate takes three seconds.
Bradley-Ward said his team has stopped what they were working on to come up with a better solution.
Instead of ASMX constantly updating Ablrate lender dashboards with an updated balance, lenders allocate their funds to the secondary market and ASMX updates their balance on Ablrate around once every 30 minutes or as requested by the customer by clicking a button.
However, while the money moves from the available balance of Ablrate, it doesn’t in fact move, but stays in the Ablrate segregated client account. This is similar to how investors can move funds back and forth between their standard and Innovative Finance ISA accounts, while the money doesn’t actually move location.
“This allows ASMX to be as fast as it wants, without affecting the synchronicity of the two platforms, or any other platform that is connected,” said Bradley-Ward.
“We’ve been working on that and debugging some of the code we’ve been working on and uploading that to our staging server. Hopefully we’ll soon be in a position to test everything.
“When we test connections between Ablrate and ASMX I suspect there will be a few bugs to fix, but we’ve done thousands of tests and we’re pretty confident everything will soon be good to go.”
Bradley-Ward revealed that open banking is something his team is looking to incorporate into ASMX.
“There’s all sorts of tools that will be in the ecosystem at a certain stage, we have a business intelligence system for manipulating data, API credit data on companies and we will be using open banking to layer extra data,” he said.
“This is all aimed at providing more and better tools for lenders to make decisions.”
Last month Bradley-Ward said ASMX will launch first for Ablrate investors, before opening it out to other P2P lending platforms.
And he has been seeking investor feedback over whether to include a diversified investment option, after an opportunity arose for ASMX to work with a fixed income fund that would essentially manage a diversified portfolio across all of Ablrate’s loans.