BNP Paribas has arranged and placed the first Sovereign digital bond issuance for Eurozone and EMEA to make bond settlement more efficient and secure. 

Following this announcement, BNP Paribas placed the first Sovereign digital bond issuance for Eurozone and EMEA, the Republic of Slovenia with on-chain settlement. The financial institution used the Banque de France’s (BdF) tokenised Cash solution provided within the European Central Bank’s (ECB) wholesale central bank money (CeBM) settlement experimentation programme. 

Throughout this initiative, BNP Paribas also acted as Global Coordinator and Sole Bookrunner on this transaction and Clifford Chance as advisor.

More information on the announcement

According to the official press release, the issuance of digital securities made by the Republic of Slovenia with a nominal size of EURO 30 million coupon of 3.65% and final maturity due 25th of November 2024 was performed leveraging Neobonds, the BNP Paribas Global Markets private tokenisation platform. The solution was developed in order to record the legal ownership of digital bonds, which provides an operational framework for issuing and trading digital bonds, as well as automatically generating coupons and supporting all of the lifecycle events, including the secondary trading.

BNP Paribas is set to continue to participate with further real transactions and experiments until the end of the ECB programme, in order to gain a deeper understanding of all three wholesale CeBM settlement solutions: the Banque de France’s, Deutsche Bundesbank’s, and Banca d’Italia’s. This participation will mark another step by BNP Paribas towards the overall use of tokenisation in wholesale capital markets. 

Currently, BNP Paribas operates two tokenisation platforms, Global Markets Neobonds built with Digital Asset’s Daml and leveraging Canton blockchain, and BNP Paribas CIB’s AssetFoundry, which is a Ethereum based platform. These infrastructures are operating with the main blockchain technologies, and were developed to give BNP Paribas the possibility to adapt to the evolution of financial markets on Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT).