Vanguard Pilots Blockchain for Index Data Management
While blockchain has not quite lived up to its hype as the replacement for almost every part of the trading lifecycle, financial firms are finding it useful in managing some of the “less-sexy” and data-heavy processes that most firms have to carry out every day. Joanne Faulkner reports on one such initiative underway around index data management at Vanguard.

To manage an index fund, Vanguard needs to capture “timely, accurate index data” that is “constantly ready to go and reflective of what the index provider says the index should be,” says Warren Pennington, a principle in Vanguard’s investment management group. The asset manager identified this as a “relatively manual and inefficient process long ago”—and a problem that is not unique to Vanguard. “It’s across all index providers, and it’s manual and somewhat inefficient on both the index provider
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