Open Source in Finance Forum New York 2022

In a report entitled Time for Trust: The trillion-dollar reasons to rethink blockchain published in 2020, economists at PwC identified provenance as the number one application area that is not only driving the adoption of distributed ledger technology, but also has the potential to yield the most economic value. Payments and financial instruments are the runner-ups, so why not combine the two?

In this session, we will discuss why provenance matters and how the financial services industry can benefit from a blockchain-backed provenance solution – through the eyes of corporate actions.

A corporate action is an event that materially impacts an organization and its stakeholders. Typical corporate actions include the payment of dividends, mergers, acquisitions, spinoffs, among other events. A single event may involve hundreds of market participants, and may cascade down to thousands of investors. The management of corporate actions is a complex process, and to a large extent, it’s still manual. Errors in the handling of a corporate action may result in major financial losses.

The ability to digitally record the issuance of a corporate action as well as its entire life journey immutably, has the potential to substantially improve corporate actions management.

Closing with a demo of provenance in action, we will showcase BTP’s Chronicle, a blockchain-backed, domain-agnostic solution for immutably recording provenance data, in this case applied to corporate actions.