Process Automation at Scale: Asset Servicing & Custody

Replace batch processing and manual approvals with programmable, conditional logic. Payments, asset transfers, and contract milestones execute automatically when pre-defined conditions are met on-chain.

• Example: A real estate platform uses smart contracts to hold escrow, releasing funds instantly upon digital confirmation of title transfer and keys, cutting settlement from 30+ days to 48 hours.
• Impact: Unlock working capital, improve liquidity, and enhance partner trust through predictable, automated execution.

Cryptographic proof of provenance and an immutable history of ownership and actions make fraud significantly harder and easier to trace. Disputes are resolved by referring to the canonical record, not conflicting databases.

• Example: A luxury goods consortium uses blockchain to track items from manufacture to retail, reducing counterfeit-related losses by an estimated $30B annually industry-wide.
• Impact: Lower insurance premiums, reduce loss reserves, and minimize legal costs associated with disputes over data integrity.

Replace fragile, point-to-point integrations with a neutral, shared infrastructure. This reduces the cost and complexity of onboarding new partners and creates a foundation for collaborative innovation without ceding competitive data.

• Example: A healthcare data exchange uses permissioned blockchain to allow hospitals, insurers, and labs to share patient records securely, with automated consent management, cutting data-sharing setup time by 70%.
• Impact: Faster ecosystem growth, lower IT integration costs, and the ability to co-create services with partners on a trusted platform.

A single, shared ledger for issuers, custodians, and investors eliminates the $3-5B annual cost of reconciliation and failed corporate actions. Every dividend or interest payment is executed as a programmable smart contract, ensuring accurate, automatic distribution to the correct wallet addresses on the record date.

• Real Example: A European bank reduced dividend processing errors by 99.7% and cut settlement time from T+3 to real-time.
• Key Benefit: Near-zero manual intervention and guaranteed payment integrity.

Transform a paper-heavy, weeks-long process into a secure digital workflow. Shareholders vote directly via tokenized ballots on-chain, with votes immutably recorded and tallied in real-time.

• Real Example: A Fortune 500 company increased retail shareholder participation from 28% to 65% by enabling mobile voting via a blockchain platform.
• Key Benefit: Enhanced governance, auditable compliance, and significant cost savings on proxy solicitation and tabulation.

Managing share swaps, tender offers, and stock splits across fragmented legacy systems is prone to delays and disputes. Blockchain creates a golden source of truth for all parties, automating entitlement calculations and asset transfers.

• Real Example: A recent SPAC merger used a blockchain platform to manage the conversion of shares and warrants for 50,000+ investors, completing in hours instead of weeks.
• Key Benefit: Drastically reduces operational risk, legal overhead, and accelerates time-to-value for complex transactions.

Every action—from record date snapshot to final distribution—is timestamped and immutably logged on a permissioned ledger. This provides regulators with real-time transparency and gives internal audit teams a verifiable, single source of truth.

• Real Example: A global custodian uses blockchain to provide instant, cryptographically verified audit reports to the SEC and other regulators, cutting compliance reporting time by 90%.
• Key Benefit: Drastically reduces the cost and complexity of regulatory reporting and internal controls testing.

A digitized corporate action engine is the foundation for issuing and managing tokenized equities, bonds, or funds. This enables fractional ownership, 24/7 trading, and programmable dividends, opening new investor markets.

• Real Example: A real estate investment trust (REIT) tokenized a property fund, using smart contracts to automate monthly rental distributions, attracting a new class of micro-investors.
• Key Benefit: Creates new product lines, improves liquidity, and enhances the investor experience.

Justifying the investment requires hard numbers. A typical enterprise deployment shows:

• 70-90% reduction in operational costs (staff, errors, reconciliation).
• ROI within 18-24 months from efficiency gains alone.
• Risk Mitigation: Eliminates multi-million dollar fines from processing errors.
• Strategic Value: Positions the firm for the future of digital assets and instant settlement.

Bottom Line: This isn't just IT spend; it's a transformation of a core financial process into a competitive advantage.

Choosing the right foundation is critical. Here are the leading enterprise blockchain platforms, each with distinct strengths:

• Hyperledger Fabric (Linux Foundation): Modular, permissioned network ideal for complex business logic and data privacy. Used by IBM, Walmart, and Maersk.
• R3 Corda: Designed specifically for financial services, enabling direct, private transactions between parties. Adopted by over 300 banks and insurers.
• Ethereum (Enterprise): Public or private deployments using the dominant smart contract standard (EVM), offering maximum developer liquidity and interoperability.
• Key Consideration: Evaluate based on governance, privacy requirements, developer ecosystem, and integration needs.