New blockchain system delivers instant, error-free corporate action data, that cost billions annually.
A group of the world’s largest financial institutions is testing a blockchain-based system designed to fix one of the costliest pain points in finance.
Chainlink, SWIFT, Euroclear, DTCC, UBS, DBS Bank, and 20 other institutions have advanced a joint project to modernize how “corporate actions”, including events such as dividends, mergers, and stock splits, are reported.
Today, corporate actions remain one of the most fragmented and error-prone processes in finance.
Announcements are often distributed through PDFs or press releases and passed down a chain of custodians, brokers, and data vendors before reaching investors. Along the way, information gets delayed, modified, or lost, resulting in $58 billion in annual costs across the global system.
On average, a single corporate action costs $34 million to process and requires more than 110,000 firm-to-firm interactions. Despite decades of investment, 75% of institutions still manually recheck the data.
The new infrastructure combines Chainlink’s oracle technology, artificial intelligence, and blockchain to create a “golden record” of corporate actions, thus a single, verified version of events shared across all participants.
In its second phase, the system reached 100% data accuracy on tested events. It introduced new “data attestor” and “contributor” roles, enabling institutions to verify, enrich, and sign records.
The platform also supports ISO 20022 messaging via Swift, and distributes the verified data across DTCC’s AppChain and other blockchains using Chainlink’s interoperability protocol.
Validated disclosures, including in Spanish and Chinese, were delivered into financial systems in minutes rather than the 24-48 hours typical today.
The next stage will widen the scope to stock splits and other corporate actions, expand to new markets and currencies, and add stronger privacy and compliance safeguards.
Next, the group plans to move beyond dividends and mergers to cover more complex events like stock splits, while also rolling the system out to additional markets and currencies. Over the longer term, they see the platform evolving into core infrastructure for automated post-trade processing across a wide range of asset classes.
Corporate actions are one of the most expensive blind spots in global finance, draining $58 billion a year through slow, manual, and error-prone processes. By proving that blockchain, AI, and existing banking rails like SWIFT can deliver instant, standardized data, this initiative lays the groundwork for faster, cheaper, and more transparent markets worldwide.
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