About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

Risk Avoidance is the Cornerstone of the Corporate Actions Business in the Current Climate, Says HSBC’s Brock

Subscribe to our newsletter

As the representative of global custodian community in the current market conditions, the focus of the industry is wholly on risk avoidance, Stephenie Brock, manager of technology and business solutions for corporate actions at HSBC Securities Services, told delegates to the CorpActions 2009 Europe conference. “Risk avoidance is in fact the cornerstone of the business at the moment,” she said, while speaking on the panel about data quality.

Risk is present in the misinterpretation of events or options, which can result in losses due to incorrect elections and late announcements, Brock explained. “One wrongly conveyed event can result in a US$5 million nightmare,” she continued. “This is why we need to make sure there is no ambiguity around the application of standards. This is becoming more complex as the more imaginative the events, the more risk is introduced.”

Dominique Tanner, head of business development at Six Telekurs, added that the data vendor has seen a surge in the requirements for data scrubbing as a result of the introduction of ISO 15022. Max Mansur, custodian services solution manager at Swift, seconded this notion and explained that Swift is working towards developing more market practice guidelines to assist in the application of standards. “There needs to be flexibility of formats for ISO 15022 messages because they have to cover 65 event types and many different markets, but this is where market practices come into play, to ensure consistency,” he said.

Brock highlighted the issue of a lack of standardised business entity identifiers as a key pain point for institutions, as they are required to spend money and effort trying to scrub that data. “There are different identifiers within different markets and sometimes it is even a struggle to find which body in a market issues these identifiers in the first place,” she elaborated.

Panellists and audience members alike agreed that it would be of benefit to the industry if Swift or another similar body could provide metrics on whether corporate actions message fields are correctly populated. This is not currently permitted due to privacy legislation, although Swift’s Simulation Test and Qualification Service (STaQS) is aimed at allowing institutions to test themselves against market practices, said Mansur.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Recorded Webinar: In data we trust – How to ensure high quality data to power AI

Artificial intelligence is increasingly powering financial institutions’ processes and workflows, encompassing all parts of the enterprise from front-office to the back-office. As organisations seek to gain a competitive edge, they are trialling the technology in variety of ways to streamline and empower multiple use cases. Some are further than others along the path to achieving...

BLOG

Data’s Evolution Continues From Cost to Core Asset: DMS New York City 2025 Preview

Modern Chief Data Officers are not only the guardians of financial institutions’ data estates, they are also the caretakers of their single-biggest asset. With every part of an organisation’s business now dependent on data, the custody of its digital information is every bit as critical to operations as the management of trading teams or even...

EVENT

TradingTech Summit London

Now in its 14th year the TradingTech Summit London brings together the European trading technology capital markets industry and examines the latest changes and innovations in trading technology and explores how technology is being deployed to create an edge in sell side and buy side capital markets financial institutions.

GUIDE

Regulatory Data Handbook 2025 – Thirteenth Edition

Welcome to the thirteenth edition of A-Team Group’s Regulatory Data Handbook, a unique and practical guide to capital markets regulation, regulatory change, and the data and data management requirements of compliance across Europe, the UK, US and Asia-Pacific. This year’s edition lands at a moment of accelerating regulatory divergence and intensifying data focused supervision. Inside,...