Interbank co-operative Swift has successfully completed its blockchain-based corporate actions pilot, which it describes as a “compelling solution.”
The pilot involved six participants from the securities industry, including American Century Investments, Citi, and Northern Trust. Its aim was to explore ways to minimize the costly frictions associated with communicating significant corporate events to investors.
The testing revealed that the experimental technology could benefit the industry by providing a clear and consistent view of corporate actions across the investor ecosystem and offering timely alerts for any changes or updates.
According to Swift, the blockchain-based system “demonstrated the potential to significantly reduce manual effort and errors in corporate action processing, delivering operational efficiencies for market participants.”
Looking ahead, the co-operative plans to further investigate the technology with its broader community to evaluate the requirements for a fully viable and scalable offering, along with potential additional features and use cases.
Tom Zschach, chief innovation officer at Swift, stated, “Our experiments harnessed the power of blockchain technology to give all market participants a single, accurate view of a corporate action event. We will now work closely with our community to assess all the features needed for developing a scalable industry-wide solution to this longstanding problem.”