IBM and Chile's Santiago Stock Exchange announced a partnership to introduce blockchain technology across the country's financial sector. The agreement makes the Santiago Stock Exchange the first stock market in Latin America to apply IBM Blockchain technology within its short selling system for securities lending. Blockchain works as an immutable ledger that records transactions, allowing secure information exchange.

Built by IBM and Chile'sSantiago Stock Exchange, the solution is designed to help reduce errors, possible fraud, and processing time for each transaction, while also improving transaction management and lowering costs. In the case of the Santiago Stock Exchange, the solution will result in significant time savings for the back-office processes. The solution developed by IBM is based on the open source Linux Foundation's Hyperledger Fabric.

The solution is expected to be widely available to support multiple parties across the financial industry ecosystem this year.