ASX has announced that CHESS will be replaced with distributed ledger technology (DLT) in early 2021. While CHESS’s average monthly service availability over the last five years has been 99.99%, ASX states that the new DLT system (commonly referred to as ‘blockchain’) will improve upon CHESS and “provide a broader range of benefits to a wider cross section of the market”. Some of the main guiding principles for the project include providing greater control to issuers and end investors, taking future needs into account, and ensuring the new system is accessible, available, and reliable. We’re excitedly following Australia’s Consumer Data Right bill on open banking, and we hope to be able to integrate with CHESS (or its replacement) in the near future. (source: Sharesight)

It's the vision, stupid! Why we need Better Broadband By Laurie Patton Monday, 13 May, 2019 While neither side of politics is saying much about our increasingly maligned National Broadband Network during the election period, the fact is Australia is falling behind in the race to leverage the benefits — economic and social — of an emerging digitally enabled future. “It’s the economy, stupid” is the slogan attributed to James Carville, who was Bill Clinton’s campaign strategist for his successful 1992 US presidential bid. It was about creating a clear campaign focus in the minds of potential voters. In 2015, newly appointed prime minister Malcolm Turnbull similarly coined the term “innovation nation” to describe what he saw as a pressing need to make Australia more innovative and agile — and an issue that would differentiate his approach to government. Turnbull’s problem was that two years earlier, under pressure from his predecessor Tony Abbott, he had laid down tracks leading in the opposite direction. Dumping a full-fibre, fixed-line nbn network in favour of the so-called multi-technology mix (MTM) model has seen us fall from around [...]