(14 September 2022 – United States) The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) has partnered fintech Symbiont to pilot a blockchain-automated corporate action project.
The project aims to automate corporate action workflow using Symbiont’s Assembly technology platform. By tapping into the platform’s smart contracts and blockchain capabilities, SWIFT will be able to improve the networking of the 11,000 plus institutions connected to SWIFT at a global level. SWIFT analysis shows 30 percent of the cost of processing corporate actions data arises from manual activities, such as data cleansing, formatting and interpretation.
Swift has incorporated several leading custodians and asset managers to participate in the distributed ledger technology (DLT) pilot including Citi, American Century Investments, Vanguard and Northern Trust.
“Major asset managers will have hundreds of custodian relationships, with assets and securities scattered across a wide range of counterparties. If there’s a corporate event, these asset managers and other intermediaries will receive information from all these sources, and this is where we start to see problems” commented SWIFT Strategy Director, Jonathan Ehrenfeld.