With the power of blockchain technology, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) announced on Tuesday that they will provide more accurate data for financial firms in collaboration with fintech company Symbiont.
The participating companies include Citigroup, Northern Trust, Vanguard, and American Century Investments.
The announcement stated that the pilot project “could help providers distribute data in near real time to global custody clients.”
They added that Assembly — Symbiont’s proprietary tech platform — and smart contracts will play a role in establishing a network effect that leverages over 11,000 institutions linked to SWIFT worldwide.
In order to increase the distribution of price index data using blockchain in 2017, Symbiont teamed up with Vanguard and used data from $1.3 trillion of funds.
“By bringing Symbiont’s Assembly and smart contracts together with SWIFT’s extensive network, we’re able to automatically harmonize data from multiple sources of a corporate action event,” said SWIFT’s Chief Innovation Officer, Tom Zschach.
Zschach added the comparison of “information shared between participants and flag discrepancies, contradictions or inconsistencies across custodians” is possible with the help of Assembly’s smart contract.
The company has been working to stay relevant in the global economic order in light of the rise of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC). The global payments’ innovation (gpi) was introduced by the interbank cooperative in 2017, with the goal of improving fee transparency and payments tracking while enabling customers to send cross-border payments whenever they want.
Due to the conflict in Ukraine, European Commission decided in February to disable the SWIFT network for a number of Russian banks. The CEO of Mastercard, Michael Miebach, recently remarked during a panel session at the Blockchain Central Davos conference that he does not believe SWIFT would be unusable in five years.
Since its founding in 1973, SWIFT has operated in 200 nations and processed more than five billion financial messages annually.
