Interbank cooperative SWIFT has successfully completed a pilot for blockchain-based solution to reduce costs associated with corporate actions. The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT) partnered with six leading securities industry participants, including Citi, Northern Trust and American Century Investments, to complete the trial.
The manual process of relaying information about corporate actions often results in recipients receiving inaccurate or missing data. To address this issue, SWIFT partnered with Symbiont’s blockchain platform to automate and boost the accuracy of corporate action workflows. The program involved participants providing data extracts from corporate actions which were converted into a blockchain-system readable format using SWIFT’s Translator tool. The six participants then performed peer-to-peer event comparisons using smart contracts matching common data fields and flagging unmatched data.
Jonathan Ehrenfeld, Securities Strategy Director at SWIFT said that asset managers often receive notifications from up to 100 different sources about the same corporate event: “This means asset managers need to manually comb through the different sources to gain a single view of the event before they can make necessary decisions.”
Tom Zschach, Chief Innovation Officer at Swift explained that "our experiments harnessed the power of blockchain technology to give all market participants a single accurate view of a corporate action event."
When news initially broke that SWIFT would pilot its cost-saving solution in partnership with Symbiont it was suggested that Ripple may be involved too as Symbiont had created a Ripple Gateway for Counterparty back in 2015. Although Ripple purports to eventually replace cross-border settlements and payments such as bank transfers done by SWIFT or Western Union payments we might see partnerships emerging soon.
Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended as legal, tax, investment, financial or other advice.