The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) is looking into how they can use Blockchain, it was announced on January 16th. The network is the existing financial mechanism for global financial transfers, offering a standardised, reliable and secure service. The memorandum of agreement just signed, with seven depositories around the world for central securities, will explore how the new tech can form part of their post-trade processes, which specifically include proxy voting.

The CSD (Central Securities Depositories) Working Group on DLT includes financial infrastructure institutions based in Switzerland, Russia, Argentina, Abu Dhabi, South Africa, Chile and the US. These seven providers agree to examine Distributed Ledger Technology to see if it could save money, as well as making post-trade processes more efficient. The group was founded informally in 2017, but now the agreement has been signed, its requirements have been formalised. In November it added the use of Swift\'s unique messaging standard, ISO 20022.

No specific details have yet been released as to the working group\'s direction, as the agreement is for initial exploration at this stage. Introducing a new technology which will function in the same way across the world is immensely complex. The first step is to bring the global CSDs together to agree on common grounds, and more importantly, to agree on DLT standards.