Swift has lauded the results of its blockchain-based solution pilot viewing it as an avenue to reducing friction and costs within the payment journey.
According to the body, progress is already being eyed within the next phase of the tech – as it looks to be scaled to a broader community.
Both manual effort and errors were cited as being two key factors that have been negated as a result of the blockchain solution, according to Swift, enhancing efficiencies for the market.
As sensitive account numbers and holdings were being redacted, the participants provided extracts of Swift MT 564 messages for the selected event types. Swift revealed that its Translator tool was used to convert the data into a blockchain-system readable format, which was uploaded onto a dedicated platform developed for the pilot.
“Our analysis found that asset managers often receive notifications from up to 100 different sources about the same corporate event, and the data is often different or contradictory from one source to another,” stated Jonathan Ehrenfeld, Securities Strategy Director at Swift.
“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.”
The exploration emphasised that the experimental solution could be a boost for the industry, ‘providing a clear and consistent view of corporate actions throughout the investor ecosystem, as well as quickly alerting when changes or updates occur’.
Furthermore, according to Swift, it also demonstrated the potential to significantly reduce manual effort and errors in corporate action processing and deliver operational efficiencies for market participants.
It comes amidst increased corporate actions off the back of the pandemic, underlining the vital nature of Swift’s embracing of blockchain.
Tom Zschach, Chief Innovation Officer at Swift, added: “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 that are needed for developing a scalable industry-wide solution to this long-standing problem.”
