Commercial Data Interchange
The Commercial Data Interchange (CDI) is the next-generation commercial data infrastructure which forms part of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority’s “Fintech 2025” strategy to facilitate efficient financial intermediation within the banking system. The CDI is a blockchain-based trusted activity-journal infrastructure to facilitate not only connection with blockchain-based and non-blockchain-based applications, but also exchange of commercial data among data owners, data providers and data consumers. Following its successful pilot launch in November 2021, the CDI platform has been officially rolled out to production in October 2022.
Introduction
HKICL Technology Solutions Limited (HTSL), a wholly-owned subsidiary of HKICL, has been invited to design, develop and operate the CDI platform. To ensure protection of data and system efficiency, the CDI does not store any datum concerned. Besides, the use of blockchain technology can ensure that all activities involving data exchange are recorded and distributed in an immutable, traceable and consistent manner among the parties connected.
Apart from processing on-demand requests for exchange of commercial data, the CDI will also further enhance the digital financial service ecosystem in Hong Kong by (i) enabling data consumers (e.g. banks) to obtain consent-based data (e.g. transaction data) from data providers through authentication of digital identities; (ii) tapping the benefits of DLT to provide traceable and verifiable records as proof of authenticity of data; and (iii) standardising APIs and data models to allow secure and efficient exchange of commercial data.