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Case study

The challenge

Our client, National Securities Depository Limited (NSDL), is one of the largest central securities depositories in the world, holding custody value amounting to US$4.21 trillion in dematerialized form in India’s capital market. NSDL wanted to create a decentralized ledger to provide a verifiable and immutable audit trail of transactions between debenture issuers and trustees.

Furthermore, NSDL wanted to avoid data quality challenges by expanding the ability to perform multilateral data sharing, protect investor interest through transparency in Asset cover and charge management, ensure compliance with submission of records and disclosure to debenture trustee, along with regulatory reporting. As part of a competitive bid process, Cognizant along with other competing vendors were invited to develop a Proof of Concept (PoC) and present a working model of a sample set of use cases along with a detailed approach for execution of this Greenfield project.

Our approach

Cognizant embarked on a journey to develop a first of its kind blockchain monitoring platform that brings transparency and standardization for secured debenture issues. It monitors the Asset cover of the security and its covenants in the corporate bonds market. To enable zero reconciliation, the blockchain-backed permissioned platform had to include all key stakeholders—debenture trustees, issuers, rating agencies and regulators. We developed dedicated role-based portals for debenture trustees and issuers and the ability to generate alerts/notifications on corporate events, timeline breaches and more. Salient features of the implementation include International Securities Identification Number (ISIN) mapping to assets, asset charge creation, reports and document management, title search, valuation, issuance of annexure documents required by exchanges and the ability to record charge payments and charge closures, including an audit log.

The solution was jointly designed and developed by Cognizant, along with NSDL architects, product managers, business analysts, developers and quality assurance engineers. Infrastructure set-up and support was provided by NSDL.

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Blockchain platform brings more transparency to the market

Today, NSDL brings discipline, standardization and transparency to capital market customers by maintaining electronic book entries for the ownership and transfer of securities and by diligently reporting the asset status. Asset securities are validated by the debenture trustees and are indisputable, and transactions recorded as periodic changes to the debenture status are monitored. As another benefit, NSDL can now prevent “over charging on the same asset” using the new feature that performs the necessary checks and balances. NSDL’s DLT platform recorded cashflow information for 3000+ ISINs by issuers. Mapping with ISIN is performed for 3700+ assets that have been created and 350+ issuers completed mapping of all their outstanding ISINs with assets. The secured ISINs mapped with assets by issuer covered almost 90% of the outstanding secured ISINs.

550+

issuers onboarded on the DLT platform

3600+

secured ISINs approved for mapping by debenture trustee

3800+

secured ISINs mapped with assets by issuer

*Stats based on outstanding ISINs as of 30-September-2023