Hana Bank said it issued a $100 million, five-year foreign-currency digital bond on September 18 through Euroclear's blockchain-based Digital Financial Market Infrastructure (D-FMI). The bank described it as the first digital-bond issuance by a Korean financial institution directly using Euroclear's blockchain infrastructure and the first same-day settlement (T+0) in Korea's foreign-currency bond issuance market.
According to Hana Bank, allocation of the bonds and transfer of funds, processes that typically take three to five business days, were handled on the blockchain and completed on the issuance date. Standard Chartered served as sole arranger, handling the bond's structuring, issuance, and sale to investors. The issuance used documentation from Hana Bank's existing Global Medium Term Note program. The bank said institutional investors could use their existing Euroclear accounts and trading systems without opening separate digital-asset accounts or completing complex additional procedures.
According to Euroclear, D-FMI handles the issuance and distribution of digital securities and settlement at issuance on a blockchain. The bonds are subsequently moved to Euroclear Bank's existing settlement platform, where secondary-market transactions are settled. The same-day settlement in this case was the initial settlement in which investors paid for and received the bonds at issuance. Hana Bank's release did not disclose the issue yield, the composition of investors, or whether the bonds had subsequently traded in the secondary market.