Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov recently appeared on Sibos TV to discuss Chainlink and Swift’s ongoing work to bring the global financial system onchain without overhauling legacy infrastructure.
During Sibos 2025, Chainlink announced a groundbreaking solution for global financial institutions to manage tokenized fund subscription and redemption workflows using the Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE) alongside their existing systems, Swift messaging standards, and the newly launched Chainlink Digital Transfer Agent (DTA) technical standard.
The first use case comprised a technical and operational pilot with UBS Tokenize, the tokenization unit of UBS Asset Management, one of the world’s largest private banks with over $6 trillion in assets under management.
Nazarov said the cutting-edge work with UBS establishes the “right way” to do tokenized funds.
“They’re creating the template for the asset management industry to show how you make a good tokenized fund. This is how you connect it to existing payment systems like Swift. This is how you receive stablecoins. This is how transfer agencies should work in that tokenized fund.”
DTA defines how transfer agents and fund administrators can support tokenized assets in accordance with existing regulatory frameworks. Nazarov explained why Chainlink’s transfer agency technical standard is a vital component of the asset servicing lifecycle.
“Transfer agency onchain unlocks the ability to tokenize all the things that rely on transfer agency. Because without transfer agency, you can tokenize it, but you can’t transfer it. So, there’s really almost no point in tokenizing it. And it really is another one of those things like corporate actions, like proof of reserves for stablecoins, that unlocks the next stage of tokenization – in this case for tokenized funds and also tokenized public equity.”
During Sibos, Chainlink also announced Phase 2 of its industry initiative to standardize corporate actions processing using oracles and AI. 24 of the world’s largest financial services institutions including Euroclear and Swift participated in developing a production-grade deployment capable of saving the global financial industry tens of billions of dollars in annual processing costs with minimal disruption to existing processes.
The system uses the Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE) to validate AI model outputs and transform them into ISO 20022-compliant messages that are transmitted to the Swift network, as well as Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP), which relays the same data across multiple private and public blockchains.
Standardizing corporate actions data onchain as a unified golden record solves costly inefficiencies and mitigates the need for manual reviews by providing all participants, from custodians to asset managers, with real-time, accurate, uniform data.
“Now you have a better corporate action final golden record,” Nazarov explained. “You have that golden record onchain, which is a transparency and data-sharing mechanism making it available to anyone who wants it.”
Chainlink’s Automated Compliance Engine (ACE), a unified standard for creating compliance-focused digital assets and services, was also front and center at Sibos, where Chainlink Labs’ President of Capital Markets, Fernando Vazquez, highlighted collaboration between fintechs and traditional financial entities as the key to scaling digital assets.
“That all integrates with Swift, once again, through Swift messages, because we have a number of Swift adapters and different systems to allow the existing Swift infrastructure to consume the information from various Chainlink services,” Nazarov explained.
He believes the future of finance hinges on combining the Swift messaging standard used by more than 11,000 global banks with the Chainlink standard for verifiable onchain data and cross-chain connectivity, which has already enabled over $26 trillion in transaction value.
“If we’re able to take the Swift standard and make it compatible with the Chainlink standard, which we’ve done, and then we’re able to put it out into the market, then you have the best of both worlds,” he said.
“Now you have reliable offchain systems and you have reliable onchain systems and they’re working together through this great partnership where both of these two standards come together to provide this unique value in this scalable, efficient way of using chains.”
Watch the full conversation.