American Technology company Chainlink has launched an industry initative to address the persistent issue of unstructured data in the financial industry. The initiative brings together leading financial market infrastructures Euroclear, Swift, and some of the world’s largest financial institutions Citi, UBS, Franklin Templeton, Wellington Management, Caceis, Vontobel, and Sygnum Bank.
The initiative aims to leverage advancements in AI, oracles, and blockchain technology to solve the long-standing problem of real-time standardised data in fragmented markets like Europe. Today, Chainlink, in collaboration with financial markets infrastructures Euroclear and Swift, as well as several major financial institutions, has released a report detailing the results.
Corporate actions, such as dividend payments and stock splits, represent one of the most complex unstructured data challenges in the financial world. Data from these actions travels through various intermediaries, including the company behind the stock, custodians, brokers, fund managers, exchanges, before reaching investors. This journey can result in data inconsistencies, varying formats, and inefficiencies, costing the financial market approximately USD 3-5 million annually, with 75% of firms manually revalidating custodian and exchange data.
Chainlink’s solution addresses the need for accurate, machine-readable data. The new system architecture employs large language models (LLMs) and decentralised oracle networks to autonomously extract and standardise unstructured data from issuers and publish it onchain. This blockchain-agnostic strategy leads to a unified “golden record” that serves as a single data source of truth for all market participants.
Along with ecosystem partners Hyperledger Besu, Avalanche, and ZKsync, the iniative has successfully demonstrated how decentralised oracles, combined with LLMs (using Chat GPT, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet) can source, validate and convert unstructured and often unreachable offchain data into digital data available in near real-time across public and private blockchain networks, compatible with existing financial systems.
While the focus is now on corporate actions as the first use case, unified golden records can also be applied to other areas, such as private assets valuation, risk management data, legal identifiers, and more.
Sergey Nazarov, Co-Founder of Chainlink: “The combination of AI and oracles is a powerful tool for taking corporate actions data and turning it to highly reliably structured data. Turning various pieces of disconnected corporate actions data into unified golden records that can then be relied on by hundreds of market participants as a definitive, golden source of truth is a huge step forward in how financial markets deal with critical and error-prone data. Solving this problem allows asset managers, banks, and financial market infrastructures to all be in sync much faster than today, at a fraction of the cost and with a massive reduction in costly errors that affect the financial system.”
Stéphanie Lheureux, Director Digital Assets Competence Centre at Euroclear: “By collaborating across the industry and leveraging cutting-edge technologies, we can address major pain points and redesign workflows for greater efficiency, transparency and value. Proper co-creation and implementation of AI and Digital Ledger Technology (DLT) can amplify each other’s strengths, creating golden records accessible to all in real time and paving the way for transformative solutions.”
Mark Garabedian, Director Digital Assets and Tokenisation Strategy at Wellington Management: “The complexity of corporate actions is a relevant and appropriate use case for the convergence of AI, oracles, and blockchain technology. By leveraging AI and Chainlink oracles to interpret, standardize, and deliver high-value unstructured data, we can dramatically reduce the manual processes required, enabling significant potential operational efficiency and cost reduction while ensuring that data flows through the system with the required levels of accuracy and transparency.”
Transforming Asset Servicing With AI, Oracles, and Blockchains
