Thomson Reuters has added significant shareholder and beneficial ownership data to its DataScope Select reference data platform in support of asset managers that must comply with regulations covering the disclosure of holdings in sensitive industries and holdings that exceed a percentage threshold of the outstanding capital of a company.
The global regulations covering these disclosures include SEC Rule 13D and the Transparency Directive in Europe, while similar disclosures are also part of Solvency II and MiFID II. The regulations are intended to protect industries and companies from hostile takeover, but the compliance process is complex, often manual and prone to error. Thomson Reuters is easing the burden by providing granular data on shares and voting rights at the instrument and issuer level in the different varieties of share types, such as listed, Treasury, outstanding and issued, that are demanded by regulators.
The company decided to add the content to DataScope Select in response to a large asset manager’s statement that gathering and managing data for shareholding disclosures is a top reference data issue. The content is sourced from 150 sources across 99 countries and covers about 12 data points, providing a level of granularity that supports regulatory compliance as well as roll up to issuer level or disaggregation at instrument level.
Tim Lind, global head of financial regulatory solutions at Thomson Reuters, explains: “Investors need granular and more precise data to calculate and monitor a firm’s threshold of ownership of a given issuer, long or short, on a daily basis. The data is difficult to source and maintain, making it very expensive for individual asset managers. Thomson Reuters makes the data economically viable by scaling it to multiple customers.”
Asset managers are expected to use the data not only to meet regulatory compliance requirements around shareholding disclosures, but also to calculate risk exposure to a single name issuer and for risk reporting when considering capital at risk in a company.
