SETL is open sourcing its blockchain toolkit Portl in an effort to speed up adoption of distributed ledger technology by banks who have been wary of trusting their core ledger to a proprietary platform.
Portl provides a permissioned toolset for financial institutions to build applications that interoperate between existing infrastructures and a range of enterprise ledger technologies including Corda, Besu, Fabric, DAML and SETL's own ledger.
Despite all the hype, banks and financial institutions are struggling to bring blockchain applications into profitable production. SETL which emerged from administration in May last year after filing for insolvency, is hoping that a move to open source will help to convince clients to make the leap to live application.
Philippe Morel, SETL CEO says: “The potential of DLT solutions is still significantly underexploited. With our open-source and fully interoperable Portl framework, we hope to contribute to a wider adoption of DLT-based solutions.”
The Portl framework includes a normalising layer for a range of enterprise ledgers, a BPMN2 workflow environment based on the opensource Camunda engine and ISO15022/ISO20022 integration with Swift. To ease integration with existing systems, SETL has adopted Kafka, the open source, high volume event engine as its main backbone for inter-process communication.
SETL chief engineer, Anthony Culligan, comments: "Our use of high capacity and battle-hardened components such as Kafka and Camunda is in line with the technology journey financial institutions are taking. Porrtl bridges the gap between ledger innovation and business integration allowing the true benefits of DLT to make the jump from POC to live operation."
The move has been welcomed by SETL's corporate backers. Joerg Guenther, global head of technology for Citi Securities Services, says: “We have been working with SETL for several years and are in the process of deploying their solutions within our Securities Services business. SETL’s strategy to open source its technology and ensure interoperability is a positive step to enabling scalability of DLT use cases."