# Unlocking Digital Assets In Securities Finance Nqeu7

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[00:00:00.560] Hi, friends. Welcome back to another episode of Peer Connections, the podcast series brought
[00:00:08.440] to you by the Global Peer Financing Association, also known as GPFA. These podcasts offer our
[00:00:13.380] GPFA members and global beneficial owner friends a forum for information sharing and discussion
[00:00:18.180] on topics most important to them. And we hope you, our listeners, appreciate the insights,
[00:00:22.780] best practices, and transparency offered from our members and industry friends about securities,
[00:00:26.960] finance, or related investment areas. Now let's get into the episode.
[00:00:35.970] All right, listeners. Well, it's been a moment since the GPFA Global Peer Financing Association
[00:00:41.830] podcast, Peer Connections, has graced your listening channels. But we're back and we're
[00:00:47.610] back in a pretty exciting way because we're back in partnership with the team from ISLA,
[00:00:53.110] which is the International Securities Lending Association, in advance of their upcoming annual
[00:00:57.550] conference in June in Madrid this year. I am one of your hosts today, Brooke Gilman,
[00:01:02.990] and I have back with me one of the core GPFA members, Mr. Matt Brunette from Norges Bank.
[00:01:09.150] Matt, how are you doing? Good, thank you. Happy to be back.
[00:01:12.830] Good. I keep hoping we're going to do more and more of these, hopefully, to pick it up for
[00:01:16.630] Peer Connections, Matt. So Matt and I have been trying to lead an effort to both bring greater
[00:01:23.070] education to the peer community within GPFA, but in particular, ahead of an upcoming industry
[00:01:29.130] conference, which is ISLA's Global Securities, Finance, and Collateral Management Conference
[00:01:33.590] in Madrid, Spain, which the dates are June 17th and 19th. So coming up in the days and weeks ahead,
[00:01:41.250] we look forward to hopefully seeing as many beneficial owners in attendance there for that
[00:01:44.690] conference. And so in advance of that, Matt took a good look at the agenda, both understanding the
[00:01:50.330] focus of that conference, but also in your role, Matt, as a board member for ISLA to better
[00:01:55.310] understand and think through what topics might be useful to do a bit of a deeper dive or a bit
[00:02:00.790] of an intro to ahead of the conference for beneficial owners. And so with that, one of
[00:02:05.150] the topics we identified was digital assets. And conveniently, and luckily, ISLA has a lot of
[00:02:11.330] expertise in that space. We have an expert today, thankfully, in the digital assets space that sits
[00:02:16.870] on the ISLA board. And that's Matthew McDermott from Goldman Sachs. Matthew, how are you doing?
[00:02:22.450] I'm doing well, thanks.
[00:02:23.310] Thank you for having me.
[00:02:24.430] Good, good.
[00:02:25.310] And so, Matthew, I think it's very interesting.
[00:02:27.870] I know that you have, sounds like a long history in the securities finance space, but with
[00:02:32.030] your title being the Global Head of Digital Assets at Goldman Sachs, sitting on the ISLA
[00:02:36.270] board, I think it's an interesting area of focus for the association and for securities
[00:02:41.250] finance in general.
[00:02:42.170] Maybe can you just give me a sense of your background and role at Goldman and your connection
[00:02:46.670] back to securities finance and sort of how both maybe you see digital assets strategically within
[00:02:51.770] your bank, but also that area of focus for Isla? Yeah, absolutely. So I've been at Goldman a long
[00:02:58.050] time, actually. I've been there since like 2005, and I've done a number of different jobs within
[00:03:02.690] the organization. But kind of post the financial crisis, I started to kind of lean into teams that
[00:03:08.670] were focused on financing both the firms and client assets, which was a broad cross-section
[00:03:13.750] of different asset classes. And as things meandered, the latter position I held was
[00:03:18.930] running globally a team called Cross Asset Financing. And as is the way at Goldman Sachs,
[00:03:23.870] you're always looking to kind of keep yourself at the front of the game. And so in 2017-18,
[00:03:29.370] this emergence of blockchain technology came to the fore. And the foundations of which really
[00:03:35.650] did lend themselves to really improving the efficiency in and around how we could finance
[00:03:40.490] across the market, be that repo, securities, finance, and other means, be that loans.
[00:03:44.930] And so I started to take a kind of keen interest in it then. And then towards the end of 2019,
[00:03:50.650] I was asked by a number of different people within the organization to take over what was a very
[00:03:55.350] fledgling business called Digital Assets. And for me, the real catalyst to join that business or
[00:04:00.870] really develop the business was to see how we could transform the financing markets.
[00:04:05.750] and so you kind of roll on five years and we're here today and you have a team of about 70 people
[00:04:11.490] and we do a whole slew of different things across that business but you know still at the core of
[00:04:16.650] that is using the distributed ledger technology to think about how we can more efficiently transact