Nasdaq has partnered with the National Bank of Georgia (NBG) to deploy its Calypso treasury and capital markets platform across five of the country’s largest commercial banks: Bank of Georgia, TBC Bank, Liberty Bank, Terabank and Basisbank. The deployment, coordinated under the Georgian Market Advancement Program (GMAP) and the Georgian Financial Markets Treasuries’ Association (GFMTA), marks one of the more structured country-level treasury modernisation programmes to emerge in the South Caucasus region.
The five participating institutions collectively hold the majority of Georgia’s commercial banking sector assets, which have approached USD 38 billion following double-digit growth over the past five years. Rather than each bank procuring and operating the platform individually, all five will share a single Calypso instance hosted at a centralised location, with each institution represented as a separate entity and its data fully segregated. Project management funding has been provided by Japan through the Japan-EBRD Cooperation Fund.
The deal
The platform will span the complete front-to-back trade lifecycle: front-office deal capture and pricing, middle-office risk management and compliance, and back-office settlement, accounting and financial reporting. The shared architecture also delivers a standardised reporting layer, which the NBG says will give it materially improved visibility into treasury exposures, liquidity positions and systemic risk across the sector. Common data standards include alignment with ISO 20022, the global financial messaging framework increasingly mandated in cross-border payment and securities settlement.
NBG Governor Natia Turnava said the initiative reflects the central bank’s commitment to building a financial market that is “robust, transparent, aligned with international best practice, and equipped to support Georgia’s continued economic growth.”
Magnus Haglind, head of capital markets technology at Nasdaq, framed the model as a template for emerging markets: “By drawing on Nasdaq’s experience navigating modernisation programs at scale, firms gain access to deep institutional knowledge and the ability to evolve without bearing the full cost, risk, or operational complexity of doing it alone.”
Market context
The shared-infrastructure model is gaining traction beyond Georgia. Several smaller markets have found that the capital and operational burden of deploying enterprise-grade treasury systems at the individual bank level is prohibitive, particularly as regulatory requirements for risk reporting and audit trails tighten. A centralised deployment funded through a multilateral framework, in this case drawing on EBRD cooperation funds alongside the NBG’s institutional coordination, addresses that constraint without requiring each bank to replicate the full implementation cost.
Nasdaq’s Calypso platform competes in the treasury and capital markets technology space against vendors including Murex, Finastra and ION Group, all of which offer comparable front-to-back architectures. The competitive differentiator here appears to be Nasdaq’s willingness to structure a multi-institution shared instance, a deployment model that requires the central bank to act as a coordinating authority, as the NBG does here.
For Georgia, the broader significance is regulatory convergence. The GMAP initiative, if implemented on schedule, should put the country’s five largest banks on harmonised reporting standards and unified audit infrastructure, reducing the fragmentation that has historically complicated macroprudential oversight. The NBG, which functions as an integrated financial supervisor covering commercial banks, payment service providers and virtual asset service providers, stands to gain as much from the supervisory data as the individual banks gain from the operational efficiency.