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The expansion of Microsoft’s blockchain-based offering for gaming rights and royalties management provides a financial system of record – from contract creation to payment and reconciliation.
Improving the end-to-end royalties experience
The gaming industry serves over 2.7 billion consumers worldwide. This is enabled through partnerships between gaming platforms such as Microsoft Xbox and thousands of publishers, developers, authors, designers, production houses and distributors. These relationships are all key in maintaining a high-quality product and attracting the best talent and creators to the platform.
And in recent news, EY and Microsoft expand Xbox enterprise blockchain platform for rights and royalties management to provide a financial system of record – from contract creation to payment and reconciliation.
Microsoft plans to use the expanded blockchain functions to enable its Microsoft Xbox gaming partners and its network of artists, musicians, writers and other content creators to gain increased visibility into tracking, management and payment processing for royalty contracts. EY expects to help its business-to-business enterprise clients that have contractually driven, multiparty cash flow distributions to create similar blockchain platforms to help them automate contract-related calculations and processing.
With its expanded blockchain, Microsoft is able to:
- Accelerate contract digitization for faster contract creation using artificial intelligence (AI), based on Microsoft Azure
- Seamlessly generate and integrate statements and invoices with enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications to process and record royalties with increased speed and greater visibility and transparency
- Generate accounting entries from the blockchain platform into existing ERP applications for improved efficiency and accounting capabilities
- Incorporate the controls and compliance standards required to meet the criteria for the offering to function as a financial system of record
These new capabilities will help improve the end-to-end royalties experience by integrating with Microsoft’s gaming ecosystem and providing all of their partners on the blockchain network earlier visibility and availability of data in statements and invoices from a single source: the Microsoft rights and royalties blockchain. The blockchain extension builds on the continued collaboration between EY and Microsoft. This technology will help transform the future of entertainment.
For more information on EY and blockchain, visit EY Blockchain.
In this go-live, we successfully generated the first round of partner payments utilizing blockchain and smart contract technology. This expanded solution will help streamline financial and operational processes with the ability to scale, reduce heavy manual overhead and improve the experience for Microsoft’s gaming partners. We look forward to continuing to scale this solution across our royalties ecosystem — improving our processes and the continuation of our modern finance journey.
Blockchains could well become the glue that digitizes interactions between enterprises. This go-live represents another big step on that path, extending the level of automation and cycle time compression all the way from digitizing the contract to posting financial accruals. Blockchain solutions like this help raise the bar for enterprise integration, from point-to-point integration to ecosystem-level automation.