The Association of National Numbering Agencies (ANNA), a global member association seeking to foster standardisation within the financial industry by upholding the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) principles and by promoting International Securities Identification Numbers, ISINs, and Classification of Financial Instrument codes, CFIs, and Financial Instrument Short Names, FISN, for financial instruments, announce a new Technology Taskforce (TF-22) on Digital Assets. This initiative has been created to help examine how ISINs may be able to help identify possible harmonisation of standards.

 ANNA’s Technology Task Force (TF-22) will examine the identification of digital assets such as tokens and cryptocurrencies, blockchain technology and its’ associated evolution and application in the financial markets industry. This, with the objective to assess the role and scope of ISINs in respect to digital asset identification and provide recommendations on the potential benefits of creating guidelines for the assignment of ISINs to all kinds of digital assets e.g. asset tokens, payment tokens, utility tokens and hybrid tokens. Underpinning this evaluation is ANNA’s core aim to support a transparent, compliant and efficient financial markets structure. 

Uwe Meyer, Executive Director & Secretariat, ANNA, said, “With digital assets emerging as a new investment class, the availability of quality, standardised reference data will serve as the foundation for a trusted token market. As the registration authority for the ISIN, ANNA has been responsible for evolving the ISIN standard through its work to benefit the industry at large. As a result, ISINs are issued today in more than 200 jurisdictions worldwide, enabling efficient global cross-border trading and improved transparency. We hope that this TaskForce will ensure that we continue to utilise the ISIN standard wherever we can be sure it will be of most use to the industry. This evaluation process on digital assets is an important part of that journey.”

Manuel Alonso, Convenor of ANNA TF 22, said, “Potential institutional participants in the digital token ecosystem will need accurate, reliable, quality data attributes to make appropriate investment and trading decisions; much like participants in traditional financial markets have today. Issuers of digital tokens are in urgent need of trusted, machine-readable, ISO identifiers and related standards. We have set up the Technology Taskforce to assess the role that ISINs may take to help this process.”