Deutsche Börse CIO and COO Dr Christoph Böhm has welcomed a major new strategic partnership with Google Cloud – as the German exchange operator eyes the launch of an “an institutional-grade ecosystem for trading digital assets” dubbed “D7” which will be powered by GCP infrastructure under the ten-year deal.
Deutsche Börse Group will be following Switzerland’s SIX by launching digital exchange infrastructure – the latter set up an exchange for digital/tokenised assets after securing regulatory approval in late 2021. (In November 2022 UBS launched the world’s first native digital bond with intended dual listing and trading on SIX Digital Exchange and SIX Swiss Exchange; SIX has also since won clearance from regulator FINMA to support the issuance, trading and settlement of tokenised bonds denominated in EUR from February 1, 2023.)
Deutsche Börse Google Cloud
Deutsche Börse CIOO Dr Christoph Böhm said Google Cloud would be “our preferred cloud partner over the next ten years with a strong focus on infrastructure for digital securities (our D7 offering) and the build-up of a rich ecosystem for digital assets.”
The exchange operator added on January 9 that the partnership “also seeks to innovate Deutsche Börse Group’s digital asset business with an institutional-grade offering, including a Digital Assets Business Platform with a cloud-native market infrastructure, combining centralized and decentralized financial infrastructure to deliver crypto spot and derivatives products.”
“Exchanges sit at the epicenter of the financial ecosystem and have an increasingly important role to play to drive the future of market innovation and efficiencies,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud in a canned statement. “Our partnership with Deutsche Börse Group underscores the wide range of opportunities and benefits that secure and reliable cloud technology, data analytics, and AI can have for all market participants.”
The Deutsche Börse and Google Cloud also plan to jointly deploy a data mesh for several of Deutsche Börse Group’s data distribution and data use cases in the cloud, saying "Google Cloud’s scalable and secure infrastructure will underpin the new platforms, paired with Google Cloud’s leading data and connectivity products. "
Deutsche Börse Group in May 2019 also closed a deal with Microsoft that saw the operator of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange – and a host of other prominent trading platforms – begin to shift services to Azure.
As The Stack’s Ed Targett noted at the time: “The contract is an industry milestone and a significant indicator that European regulators are overcoming their historical distrust of the cloud, given the centrality of the €23 billion by market cap Deutsche Börse to a range of European markets [and the fact that] the contract takes regulated workloads into the cloud. This includes services that are typically provided by financial institutions like Deutsche Börse themselves and are considered essential for their critical core business.”
“ Our multi-cloud strategy has proven to be a great home for innovation and growth” said Dr Böhm.
