Chainlink & major banks unite to cut $58 billion costs in global corporate actions

Chainlink has announced the expansion and progress of an industry initiative aiming to address inefficiencies and costs associated with corporate actions processing in global capital markets.

The collaborative effort now involves 24 major financial and market infrastructure organisations, including global names such as DTCC, Swift, Euroclear, UBS, DBS Bank, BNP Paribas' Securities Services business, ANZ, Wellington Management, and Schroders. Other participants include SIX, TMX, CEVALDOM, Grupo BMV, ADDX, Orbix Technology, Marketnode, Wamid, Zürcher Kantonalbank, Vontobel, CTBC Bank, Causeway Capital Management, Sygnum Bank, AMINA Bank, and Zand Bank.

Cost challenge

Data from Citi's 2025 Asset Servicing report estimates that corporate actions processing costs the global financial industry $58 billion each year. The per-event processing average totals $34 million and involves in excess of 110,000 firm interactions. Despite mounting costs, automation rates remain below 40%, while manual data revalidation is prevalent among 75% of market participants.

Technology integration

The initiative utilises the Chainlink oracle platform in conjunction with blockchain and artificial intelligence technologies. The arrangement enables real-time sharing of structured and validated corporate actions data across multiple languages, integrated directly into existing systems, which reduces processing times from several days to minutes.

The Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE) coordinates the validation of outputs from multiple AI models and translates these outputs into ISO 20022-compliant messages. These messages are transmitted through the Swift Network, with the Chainlink Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) simultaneously distributing validated records across DTCC's blockchain ecosystem and other blockchain infrastructures. These processes are intended to allow simultaneous access and verification by financial institutions.

The initiative has also introduced specific roles for data attestors and contributors, enabling cryptographic attestation of data accuracy and direct contribution to any missing data fields, which produces a verifiable chain of custody for each corporate action.

Consensus and reach

Testing results indicated nearly full consensus among AI models across all evaluated corporate actions, and the system displayed the capacity to process multinational disclosures written in languages such as Spanish and Chinese. This feature further supports the system's application across different jurisdictions.

The outcome is the creation of a unified golden record for corporate actions, described as a real-time, attested source of truth available for custodians, post-trade systems, and smart contracts alike. This approach could help facilitate synchronisation and automation in tokenised equity markets across both legacy and emerging blockchain-based platforms.

Industry perspectives

"I am very excited about our collaboration with Swift, DTCC, Euroclear, UBS, DBS, and many other leading financial institutions on solving corporate actions onchain, a problem that has to be solved in order for tokenized public equity to scale up and work correctly onchain," said Sergey Nazarov, Co-Founder of Chainlink, described the initiative's significance for onchain market infrastructure.

He continued, "Being able to solve the data validation problem of corporate actions using AI Oracle Networks from Chainlink is a big leap forward in what AI Oracle Networks are capable of, showing that multiple AIs can come to consensus on critical information inside of a Decentralized Oracle Network. Placing this AI consensus-validated corporate actions record onchain and across chains using CCIP is a huge step forward for how corporate actions can work across the capital markets."

Dan Doney, Managing Director & Chief Technology Officer, DTCC Digital Assets, added, "By leveraging DLT, we can bring increased levels of transparency, connectivity and accuracy to the ecosystem. We welcomed the opportunity to bring this use case to life and demonstrate how innovative technology can transform processes and deliver new capabilities and value to the industry."

Stéphanie Lheureux, Director, Digital Assets Competence Centre at Euroclear, said, "Delivering scalable digital market infrastructure means aligning new solutions with the systems institutions already trust. Industry-wide coordination around standards and interoperability, as demonstrated in this initiative with Chainlink and major financial institutions, is key to achieving that at scale."

Mark Garabedian, Director of Digital Assets & Tokenization at Wellington Management commented, "For asset managers, the ability to receive accurate corporate actions data quickly and consistently in a standardized format is essential. Chainlink's platform helps enable this by supporting timely, reliable data delivery, which reduces operational overhead, lowers risk, and improves our ability to respond to time-sensitive events across global portfolios."

Wayne Hughes, Head of Digital Assets, Securities Services, BNP Paribas, stated, "We have seen, in recent years, the beginning of a shift from discrete, individual experimental programmes to a wider cross-industry cooperation when it comes to blockchain usage. We are eager to embrace this collaborative culture at BNP Paribas' Securities Services business. Contributing to this industry-wide initiative led by Chainlink is a great opportunity to identify how blockchain can be leveraged to improve corporate actions processing to the benefit of our clients."

Nigel Dobson, Banking Services Lead Institutional, ANZ, remarked, "In an increasingly agentic financial ecosystem, where automation, tokenization, and AI-driven decisioning are reshaping market infrastructure, corporate action compliance must evolve from a fragmented, manual process to a unified, verifiable standard. The Chainlink-led initiative demonstrates how blockchain can deliver attested, real-time corporate actions data across jurisdictions and platforms-reducing operational risk, enabling smart contract automation, and laying the foundation for scalable digital asset servicing."

Next steps

Future development for the initiative will include extending the workflow to address more complex corporate actions, such as stock splits, expanding coverage to additional jurisdictions and currencies, and introducing stronger privacy and governance measures to meet evolving operational and compliance expectations.