EY and Microsoft have launched a blockchain solution for content rights and royalties management in a bid to streamline the costly and time-consuming processes.

The solution has been designed to serve any industry where intellectual property or assets are licensed to other parties and where the creators are paid royalties based on royalty agreements. The objective is to enhance trust and transparency between industry players, reduce operational inefficiencies, and remove the need for costly manual reconciliation and partner reviews.

The new rights and royalties management solution aims to provide near real-time visibility of sales transactions to the participants in the blockchain network. The embedded smart contract architecture will enable accurate and real-time calculation of each participant's royalty position, providing enhanced visibility for recording and reconciling of royalty transactions.

The solution is first being deployed within Microsoft’s gaming ecosystem. Microsoft intends to deploy the solution in a phased manner. The solution will enable the gaming partners to get improved visibility to the transactions versus the legacy process, which could take up to 45 days or more, as well as generate accounting accruals on a daily basis and use the timely data to improve their forecasting.

Ubisoft, a leading game publisher and a Microsoft gaming partner, is testing the solution.

"Deploying this blockchain solution will allow us to efficiently manage high volumes and automate processes, while at the same time improve partner satisfaction and enhance compliance. Smart contract technology is far more flexible and scalable than any prior solution for managing business agreements. We look forward to deploying this solution across our gaming ecosystem and exploring additional blockchain applications for other finance processes at Microsoft,” Grace Lao, General Manager of Finance Operations, Microsoft, said.

According to the official release, the solution is built using the Quorum blockchain protocol and Microsoft's Azure cloud infrastructure and blockchain technologies, and implements confidentiality of agreements across entities.

When fully operational, the blockchain solution is expected to encompass thousands of Microsoft royalty partners and process millions of transactions per day, making it one of the world's largest enterprise blockchain ecosystems.