S&P Global Market Intelligence has won the award for Best Corporate Actions Processing Solution in A-Team Group’s Data Management Insight Awards Europe 2023. These annual awards recognise leading providers of data management solutions, services, and consultancy to capital markets participants across Europe.
S&P Global Market Intelligence’s corporate actions processing solution was selected as an award winner by A-Team Group’s European data management community.
Ankush Zutshi, Managing Director, Global Head – Corporate Actions, at S&P Global Market Intelligence, explains the challenges of corporate actions processing and how the company’s award-winning solution resolves these challenges and delivers both operational and business benefits. He also discusses the solution’s development roadmap.
A-Team: What are the challenges of corporate actions processing for capital markets participants?
Ankush: The complexity and effort involved in sourcing and interpreting corporate actions information to ensure accuracy and timeliness is significant, and the accuracy required in every step further adds to the risks and operational costs. Relying on inefficient manual processes and legacy systems to process corporate actions is a massive risk to a firm’s reputation and finances.
In recent years, the financial industry has witnessed a remarkable transformation in the way corporate actions are processed. Understanding the impact of the complexity and variability of corporate actions is key, as are corresponding and efficient corporate actions processes that integrate data from multiple systems and reconcile the data. This is a persistent challenge faced by financial institutions involved in corporate actions processing.
A-Team: How does S&P Global Market Intelligence help customers address these challenges?
Ankush: S&P Global Market Intelligence enables clients to address the complexities of corporate actions processing by automating the entire corporate actions event processing lifecycle. It replaces error-prone manual processes with streamlined automation that minimises operational risks and enhances efficiency delivering 99.9% accuracy.
Real-time monitoring and automated alerts ensure timely actions, thereby reducing missed opportunities. Analytics tools offer insights for informed decisions. Ready integration with custodians and market infrastructure enhances speed of adoption, while exploration of emerging technologies unlocks new opportunities for transparency and efficiency gains.
A-Team: More specifically, what does the company’s award-winning corporate actions solution offer to users?
Ankush: The S&P Global Market Intelligence Corporate Actions Solution brings together the unique combination of our corporate actions processing solution and centralised source of validated golden-source data powered by our deep domain expertise and covering 170 countries and territories.
The solution automates the entire corporate actions operation, with 1.4 million corporate actions manually validated each year, for all asset classes, markets, client types, and business lines worldwide. It eliminates the challenge of collecting and validating corporate actions data and reduces data and processing errors, duplication and delayed or missed events and tasks.
In addition, clients gain access to a global community of post-trade operational users who share their experiences, best practices and insights and together help to drive the evolution of our product roadmap.
A-Team: What key techniques and technologies does the solution include?
Ankush: The corporate actions platform provides real-time workflow and risk monitoring to execute end-to-end processes supported by user-friendly dashboards and self-service analytics. Automation and digitisation methods replace manual, error-prone processes, minimising operational risks and improving efficiency.
By integrating data from multiple sources and automating data validation, reconciliation, and exception handling, the solution supports end-to-end processing of the corporate actions lifecycle covering data, determination of eligible positions, client notifications, processing of elections, tax entitlements, final payments, and disbursements.
Automated alerts and notifications inform stakeholders about critical milestones, ensuring prompt decision-making and reducing the risk of missed opportunities or errors. Standardised interfaces and messaging protocols ensure smooth information flow and interoperability across systems, reducing manual interventions and increasing operational efficiency.
A-Team: What are the operational and business benefits of implementing S&P Global Market Intelligence corporate actions processing?
Ankush:
- Operational efficiency: The technology streamlines the entire corporate actions processing workflow, automating previously manual and error-prone tasks. This enhances operational efficiency by reducing processing times and minimising the risk of mistakes.
- Risk mitigation: The technology provides automated data validation, reconciliation and exception handling via real-time monitoring capabilities for both corporate actions and proxy voting processing, enabling market participants to stay updated on event progress and take timely actions.
- Seamless Integration: Standardised interfaces and messaging protocols ensure smooth information flow and interoperability across systems, reducing manual interventions and increasing operational efficiency.
- Scalability: Scalable architecture that manages vast amounts of data and can regulate technology resourcing in line with clients’ processing volumes.
- Accurate and complete corporate actions data: Data can be pre-configured and integrated with S&P Global Market Intelligence’s Managed Corporate Actions (MCA) solution, offering a centralised source of validated corporate actions data, reducing manual efforts, and enhancing overall data quality.
- Advanced analytics and reporting: Technology-driven analytics and reporting tools provide clients with valuable insights into corporate actions data. By leveraging advanced algorithms and visualisation techniques, market participants can perform in-depth analysis, track trends, and make informed decisions quickly.
A-Team: Please run through a short case study of S&P Global Market Intelligence’s corporate actions solution.
Ankush: A leading global investment management firm catering to a diverse clientele including pension funds, state retirement plans, foundations, endowments, sovereign wealth funds, and corporations worldwide, recognised the need to enhance the efficiency of its corporate actions operations. Its head of operations set out to look for a gold-standard solution capable of automating workflows and integrating disparate systems into a seamless front-to-back solution.
After a thorough evaluation process, the S&P Global Market Intelligence Corporate Actions Solution was selected for its robust automation capabilities and ability to provide centralised control over corporate actions processing. The solution offered comprehensive coverage via a centralised source of validated corporate actions data for 65+ corporate actions and distribution event types for more than four million equities, fixed income, and structured securities across 170 countries and territories.
The optional MCA validated data service further enhanced the client’s operational efficiency by eliminating the need for manual tasks and the hassle of chasing vendors for data exceptions.
Within just four months, the client successfully migrated from its incumbent solution to the S&P Global Market Intelligence Corporate Actions platform to support its client strategies.
A-Team: How will you develop this award-winning solution over the next year?
Ankush: We are developing a holistic post-trade asset servicing platform for both traditional and digital assets that includes facilitating crypto actions like fork, spoon, redenomination, burn, expiry, and delisting.
We will also expand our coverage by extending corporate actions data to encompass derivatives and price adjustments in new markets and exchanges.
On the buy-side, we are developing functionality for information processing needs that can help firms review upcoming maturities and interest payments to address liability management aspects.
A-Team: What does winning A-Team Group’s Data Management Insight Europe 2023 award for Best Corporate Actions Processing Solution mean to S&P Global Market Intelligence?
Ankush: Winning this prestigious award is recognition of our commitment to innovate and solve the ever-growing critical risk efficiency issues in this space. It also reaffirms our credibility and excellence in corporate actions processing.
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