Interbank co-operative Swift has successfully completed its blockchain-based corporate actions pilot, describing it as a "compelling solution".
The pilot - carried out with six securities industry participants, including American Century Investments, Citi and Northern Trust - sought to explore ways to reduce costly frictions associated with communicating significant corporate events to investors.
The testing concluded that the experimental technology could be beneficial 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.
Swift says the blockchain-based system "demonstrated the potential to significantly reduce manual effort and errors in corporate action processing and deliver operational efficiencies for market participants".
The co-operative now plans to explore the tech further with its broader community to assess the requirements for a fully viable and scalable offering, as well as additional features and use cases.
“Our experiments harnessed the power of blockchain technology to give all market participants a single, accurate view of a corporate action event,” says Tom Zschach, chief innovation officer, Swift. “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 longstanding problem.”