SWIFT joins hand with Symbiont to address the inefficiencies of the financial market
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The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) announced a collaboration with FinTech company Symbiont on Tuesday, September 13. The collaboration aims to provide more accurate data for financial firms using blockchain technology. Symbiont's smart contracts and blockchain capabilities are being used in this project to automate and improve the accuracy of corporate action workflows. In an official statement, SWIFT said,
"We’re collaborating with seven securities players – including American Century Investments, Citi, Vanguard and Northern Trust – to drive efficiencies in communicating significant corporate events. The project will trial an ambitious solution powered by Symbiont’s enterprise blockchain platform."
In 2017, Symbiont collaborated with Vanguard to improve price index data distribution via blockchain, consuming data from $1.3 trillion in funds at the time. SWIFT is testing Symbiont's proprietary technology platform, Assembly, as part of the new pilot project. SWIFT intends to leverage the more than 11,000 institutions connected to it globally. The pilot project's goal is to 'help providers distribute data in near real-time to global custody clients.'
Corporate action data from SWIFT messages is translated by SWIFT's translator tool and uploaded to Symbiont's blockchain as part of the new project. The information shared between participants is then compared by Symbiont's smart contract technology, which flags 'discrepancies, contradictions or inconsistencies across custodians.' According to Tom Zschach, Chief Innovation Officer, SWIFT,
"By bringing Symbiont’s Assembly and smart contracts together with SWIFT’s extensive network, we’re able to automatically harmonise data from multiple sources of a corporate action event. This can lead to significant efficiencies."