SWIFT published a paper detailing the opportunities of industry-wide adoption of a unique transaction identifier (UTI) that would allow market participants to track securities transactions from end-to-end throughout the lifecycle of a trade.
The paper explains how a UTI could serve as a catalyst for change across the entire securities industry and unlock numerous benefits for market participants. These include helping to reduce operational risk, improving traceability and transparency across the post-trade lifecycle, enabling improved client service and supporting the industry’s wider digital transformation agenda.
Alongside a roadmap for how it could be adopted widely, the report outlines how a UTI could offer considerable savings in operational costs and fees by reducing matching or timing fails by 90% and decreasing exceptions requiring investigation with a counterparty by 50%.