The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) hosted a live, hour-long webinar on innovations and emerging trends in U.S. Clearing on March 8 for over 500 clients, the media and interested industry participants.

The interactive roundtable discussed a range of topics including mitigating risk across the capital markets, the move to trade-date-plus-two-days (T+2) settlement, Blockchain and disruptive technologies, cybersecurity and product innovation.

The panel was moderated by Alex Tabb, Chief Operating Officer and Technology Analyst at TABBGroup, and included DTCC’s own clearing and settlement subject matter experts and strategists, Murray Pozmanter, Managing Director, General Manager, Clearing Agency Services; Dan Thieke, Managing Director, General Manager, Settlement & Asset Services; Tom Sakaris, Managing Director and General Manager of Equity Clearing Services; and Robert Palatnick, Managing Director and Chief Technology Architect at DTCC.

“Blockchain is a really interesting technology that brings a lot of capabilities, and we see our role as enabling new technologies,” said Palatnick, who oversees DTCC’s blockchain effort. “The technology is very new and there are a number of models in play in the industry, across different asset classes. Our goal is to create the right collaboration.”

The DTCC has not only embraced the blockchain technology, but also has been at the forefront of a wide-range of experiments being conducted by other companies with the technology.

“Part of our responsibility of helping the industry to innovate is [looking at] how to bring distributed ledgers into consideration for solving some industry problems. If it means we modify our business model to accommodate that, then that's the way the industry uses us”, said Palatnick.

DTCC recently made a financial investment in blockchain startup Digital Asset Holdings, LLC. It has also joined the Linux Foundation, a nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, to support the Hyperledger project, a collaborative effort to advance the Blockchain technology. DTCC’s systems director Pardha Vishnumolakala is now on the project's technical steering committee, CoinDesk reported.

In January, DTCC released a white paper that calls for industry-wide collaboration in leveraging distributed ledger technologies to modernize, streamline and simplify the siloed design of the financial industry infrastructure and address certain limitations of the current post-trade process.

DTCC is going to hold a blockchain event “2016 Blockchain Symposium” on March 29 in New York. The symposium “Blockchain: Tapping into the Real Potential” aims to “cut through the hype, discuss collaboration and use cases and imagine what innovations the future may bring.” It will bring together industry thought leaders, technology experts and policy makers and will discuss business application of blockchain and distributed ledger technology for financial market infrastructure and the industry.