Nasdaq integrates its Financial framework with Microsoft Azure Blockchain

Nasdaq, the second-largest stock exchange in the world by market capitalization, is integrating it’s Nasdaq Financial Framework (NFF) with Microsoft Azure Blockchain to build a ledger agnostic blockchain capability that supports a multi-ledger strategy. This integration is set in order to accelerate Nasdaq's blockchain capabilities to serve the industry’s rising demand.

Azure will deliver highly secure interoperation and communication between the Nasdaq Financial Framework core infrastructure, ecosystem middleware and customer technologies, using an innovative blockchain microservices suite to execute transactions and contracts.

These offerings create a sophisticated blockchain system that allow various technologies to work together in a secure, scalable way, and enable Nasdaq to meet their customer requirements across multiple projects.

Nasdaq sees immediate opportunity for blockchain to manage the delivery, payment, and settlement of transactions that may reside on multiple blockchains with different payment mechanisms.

“With multiple blockchains in use by various industry participants, we believe that the combination of NFF and Microsoft’s blockchain technology can remove some of the project complexities that exist in this realm,” says Tom Fay, Senior Vice President of Enterprise Architecture at Nasdaq.

“Additionally, as more industries move towards capital markets technology and structures, we see the potential for blockchain to provide value in secure, frictionless and instantaneous matching of buyers and sellers", he explains.

These capabilities will also allow capital market organizations to use any NFF-based applications that incorporate blockchain technologies without the need for ledger-specific skills or knowledge, which is critical as the industry pursues new use cases for distributed ledger technology.

Fay continues, “from our perspective, Azure is unlocking the power of the blockchain while removing major complexities. Our NFF integration with their blockchain services provides a layer of abstraction, making our offering ledger-agnostic, secure, highly scalable, and ultimately helps us continue to explore a much broader range of customer use cases for blockchain. Delegating to Microsoft – as a best of breed enterprise-quality partner and leader in the blockchain space – to handle all of the semantics of ledger communication, security, deployment and orchestration, allows us to focus on customer challenges and solutions at scale, rather than expending resources on building components that fall outside our core business.”

"At Microsoft, we are honored to partner with Nasdaq to evolve their innovative market-enabling technology. As the leading enterprise platform company, we are fundamentally committed to the success of our customers. We are excited to work with Nasdaq to apply cloud and blockchain technologies to industry problems that they deeply understand, and enable their continued success," says Matthew Kerner, General Manager at Microsoft Azure.