Come and learn more about the Utility Settlement Coin Project and paid opportunities for students to get involved. Learn about the project, meet the team, and enjoy some great lunch! This event is only open to UCL Students, Alumni and Faculty. Only those who register with a UCL email address will be admitted and emailed with the location of the event.

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1983 - “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?” Steve Jobs to John Scully, then an exec at PepsiCo.

2019 - “Do you want to wonder what a tokenised world in financial services looks like or do you want to be part of the team that makes it happen?” The USC team challenge for students.

The USC Project

Is a research effort sponsored by 16 major financial institutions. The effort is focussed on solving for where Blockchain meets Wholesale Banking and Payments. Simple questions, hard answers:

If tomorrow I trade EUR 100 million worth of Deutsche Telekom shares on a DLT based trading platform, how will the payment side of settling that trade work?

If I also trade Vodafone shares, how will I swap my EUR 100 million into GBP?

My bank is part of a trade finance consortium which has moved the process from paper to the Blockchain; when we get to step 8 of the 10 step process, how can the buyer pay the seller on chain, irrevocably and with certainty?

The USC Consortium

This consortium currently includes member banks, Barclays, Banco Santander, CIBC, Commerzbank, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, ING, KBC, MUFG, SMBC, State Street, UBS, Wells Fargo and financial technology company, NEX / CME.

What is the USC (Utility Settlement Coin)?

The Consortium is designing USC to be an asset-backed digital cash instrument implemented on distributed ledger technology for use within global institutional financial markets. USC is envisioned as a series of cash assets, with a version for each of the major currencies (USD, EUR, GBP, CHF, JPY, CAD, etc.) and USC will be convertible at parity with a bank deposit in the corresponding currency. Unlike cash held as a commercial bank deposit, USC will be fully backed by cash assets held at a Central Bank. Spending a USC will be spending its paired real-world currency.

USC will be the universal provider of settlement for payments, payment vs. payment and the payment side of DvP. For example, we are talking to an existing exchange looking to tokenise its current major market index assets and drive for a “T Now / T instant” settlement. That would be a disruptive change for the good. Liquidity would look very different indeed.

We expect USC will become a properly funded legal entity from Q2 2019. Then we need to manage activities across three major groups of activities:

Regulatory applications in each of the currencies we want to operate in, which will involve close work with outside counsel/law firms and the Central Banks.
Our members, both the founders and the future prospective additions to the USC family; do you worry about first impressions and managing your network? We will obsess about it.
Our prospective business partners: those trading venues tokenising assets who need a payment leg.

All that said, we are a start-up and lots of things in our new world are not so well defined. So, yes this is banking related, but it’s the bleeding edge of tomorrow’s world of financial services.

We need your help

We have a number of touch points with the CBT at UCL and want to build on that partnership. We would like to meet possible interns to join the team with paid positions for a period of 12 months from about May 2019. We want to add you to the teams supporting the three streams we showed above.

Will you be making the tea? Only your own. Photocopying? Definitely not. Will you be doing some of the grunt work of producing spreadsheets, PowerPoint decks and Word documents. Yes; in the most creative of ways. Helping us paint a clear picture for regulators, organising and communicating with our members, helping sell USC to our prospective business partners. Helping us be a universal service and in setting standards. Real contact with the real world is inevitable. We need some skilled, confident individuals.

To misquote a famous line from the movie “This is Spinal Tap”: our degree of difficulty amplifier goes up to 11.

Opportunities For Students To Get Involved

Opportunities - Technical Analysts / Business Analysts / Legal Analysts / Compliance Analysts

Role requirements – The typical target profile for these roles would be as follows:

Collaborative, team players
Quick to learn complex systems / bigger picture
Practical, creative problem solvers
Versatile – able and willing to work on anything
Excellent communicators
Disciplined, motivated, self-starters
High attention to detail / completer-finisher
An interest learning in one or more of the 4 content areas – Technology, Business, Legal or Compliance

Utility Settlement Coin - Learn about opportunities at USC