The business of securities settlement ought to look like a club night with Pete Tong. Just as the DJ and electronic music pioneer stands before a crowd effortlessly manipulating gigabytes of music from a single iPad, the back offices of the world’s financial institutions are supposed to allow traders to switch in and out of trillions of dollars worth of assets without skipping a beat.
证券结算业务应该像在俱乐部里度过一个有皮特•唐(Pete Tong)陪伴的夜晚那样。这位DJ和电子音乐先驱会站在观众面前，仅用一台iPad毫不费力地操纵海量的音乐，同样的，全球金融机构的后台原本也应让交易员能够一拍不漏地买入和卖出价值数万亿美元的资产。

In reality, their performance looks more like Rick Wakeman, the keyboardist from the 1970s prog rock band Yes, who would frantically wave his wizard-robed arms as he yanked cables out of a dozen incompatible boxes.
然而，在现实中，他们的表现看起来更像是上世纪70年代前卫摇滚乐队Yes的键盘手里克•韦克曼(Rick Wakeman)，后者将会穿着巫师袍，疯狂地挥舞着袖子从12个不兼容的乐器盒里抽线。
Harmonising the ledgers of the world’s banks requires scarcely less skill and energy. Records of trades have to be compiled and entered into those systems from the phone calls, emails and post-lunch handshakes that constitute the original bargains. Reconciling those trades and ensuring that all parties have the same records is a painstaking business. Electronic trade confirmations help, especially for standardised products, but in many markets paper tickets are still the norm.
协调全球各银行的账目需要的技巧和精力一点也不比那少。最初通过电话、电子邮件或是在午餐上谈成的交易，必须记录、汇总并录入那些系统。整理那些交易并确保各方的交易记录相同是个麻烦差事。电子交易确认不无用处，尤其是对标准化产品而言，但在许多市场上，纸质单据仍是主流。
Not all failures are as spectacular as those which culminated with Kweku Adoboli of UBS being found with up to $2bn of losses on unconfirmed deal tickets in his desk drawer. But mistakes slip through the net all the time, and cost money when they do. In the US Treasury market alone, about $50bn of trades “fail” every business day, incurring a charge equivalent to 3 per cent interest a year on the delinquent balances. Including private sector markets, the total volume of fails is likely to be in the hundreds of billions.
并非所有错误都那么让人目瞪口呆，不过瑞银(UBS)的奎库•阿多博利(Kweku Adoboli)的那次错误算是登峰造极了——别人在他办公桌抽屉里发现了一堆未确认的交易单据，导致了20亿美元的损失。不过，漏网之“误”总是会有，一旦发生就会造成损失。仅在美国国债市场，每个交易日就有大约500亿美元的交易“出错”，造成的费用相当于一年对未偿债务收取3%的利息。包括私人部门市场在内，错误总规模可能以数千亿计算。
In the world of stadium rock, the problem of standardisation was solved long ago. You do not see Radiohead’s Thom Yorke posing in front of a huge stack of electronics resembling a telephone exchange, because in 1983 the makers of synthesisers and keyboards agreed on a common standard that lets you plug one into another without an impressive work of amateur electronics.
在舞台摇滚(stadium rock)的世界里，标准化问题早已解决。你不会看到“电台司令”(Radiohead)的汤姆•约克(Thom Yorke)站在像电话交换机一样的一大堆电子乐器前，因为在1983年，合成器和键盘的制造商达成了统一标准协议，这让乐手们不用成为半个电子专家也能连接好线缆。
Financiers may not have noticed, but a technology has been invented that would solve their compatibility problem, too. Its name is bitcoin, although it could probably do with a new one; a whiff of sulphur still clings to cryptographic currencies because of their historical association with anarchists and the customers of the Silk Road online narcotics emporium. Richard Gendal of IBM has suggested that the underlying system should be called “shared ledger technology” instead.
金融业人士可能没有注意到，但能够解决兼容性问题的技术也已经发明出来。它的名字是比特币，不过它八成也不反对有个新名字；秘钥货币仍然带有一点火药味，因为它们过去与无政府主义者有些牵连，销售麻醉品的在线商城“丝绸之路”的用户也曾使用这种货币进行交易。IBM的理查德•根达尔(Richard Gendal)表示，这种基础系统应改名为“共享账目技术”。
So far as legitimate finance is concerned, the utility of this technology has little to do with its supposed ability to make transactions untraceable — a feature, if that is what it is, which can easily be switched off. It has everything to do with the “blockchain”, a public record of transactions that is updated whenever one person sends payment in bitcoins to another. Every bitcoin user can consult this shared ledger, and any copy is as good as another; there is no uniquely authoritative source. Clever encryption keeps the copies in sync, by making it easy to tell whether one of them has been doctored.
这种技术对合法金融的功用，无关乎其所谓让交易无法追踪的能力——这一功能（如果能叫做功能的话）可轻易关闭。其功用与“区块链”(blockchain)密切相关——区块链是一种公开的交易记录，每当有一人向另一人支付比特币时，这个记录就会更新。每位比特币使用者都可以查阅这个共享账本，所有拷贝都一样可靠；没有任何独特的权威来源。聪明的加密算法可以让识别某个拷贝是否遭到了篡改变得容易，从而让所有拷贝保持同步。
This is exactly what securities settlement needs: a way of recording every transaction once, sharing that record between the counterparties in exactly the same form, and updating in an agreed and standardised manner. It provides an easy way to set up the settlement systems for new or customised products.
这正是证券结算所需要的：一种记录每笔交易的方式，在交易方之间以完全相同的形式分享该记录，然后以协商一致的标准化方式更新。它为新的或者定制产品提供了一种创建结算系统的简便方法。
It also automatically creates a full, agreed record of transactions, which would assist risk management and compliance functions hugely. And, with such a system in place, it should be straightforward to ensure that netting opportunities are never missed; if one trader sells units in an exchange traded fund and a colleague buys units in the same fund, their institution need not transact with any external parties.
它也会自动创建一份全面而得到一致认可的交易记录，这将极大地有助于风险管理和合规职能。而有了这样一个系统，确保轧差机会从不会被错过应该会变得轻而易举。如果一名交易员卖出了一支交易所交易基金(ETF)的一些份额，而他（她）的同事买入了同样的一支基金，则他们所属的那家金融机构无需与任何外部交易方交易。
There is the potential for cost savings that go well beyond eliminating mistakes. Back-office employees earn salaries into six figures for reconciling settlements and confirming trades by hand. (One of the shameful secrets of financial services is how many people do jobs that could be made obsolete by a small computer program for pasting data from one window into another.)
这种技术有可能节约的成本将远不仅限于消除出错机会。后台员工拿着6位数的薪水，做的事情不过是手工整理结算和确认交易（在金融服务业，只需编一个将数据从一个窗口粘贴到另一个窗口的小程序，就会让许多人失业，这是这一行的一个可耻的秘密）。
The biggest obstacle to the adoption of “shared ledger”, of course, is one which has delayed much necessary investment in the past. It is unlikely that the banks will take on bitcoin in its current form, so they will have to agree on the design of a new standard. That means working together and trusting each other. Alas, those are habits that come less easily to bankers than to musicians.
采用“共享账目”面临一个最大的障碍，这个障碍在过去当然也曾延迟了许多亟需的投资。银行不太可能会使用当前形式的比特币，因此它们将必须就新标准的设计达成一致。这意味着要合作，要相互信任。可惜的是，银行业人士比音乐家更难养成这些习惯。