IMD & IRD Awards 2022: Best corporate actions data provider—S&P Global Market Intelligence

OVERVIEW

S&P Global Market Intelligence’s (formerly IHS Markit’s) Managed Corporate Actions (MCA) solution helps financial firms overcome the challenges of acquiring and managing vast volumes of raw corporate actions (CA) data. MCA provides access to a single, central source of validated corporate actions data, eliminating the need for firms to subscribe to multiple data sources and carry out their own data cleansing. In doing so, it helps not only to bring down the operational costs associated with data acquisition and validation, but also reduces the risk of making investment decisions based on inaccurate or untimely data. 

THE SOLUTION

MCA is a centralized source of validated corporate actions data for nearly 3 million equities, fixed-income and structured securities across 170 countries and territories. It streamlines the collection, validation and dissemination of corporate actions operations, thus providing a real-time announcement solution for event-level data, dates, options, terms, conditions, and restrictions.

A key advantage of the platform is that it allows customers to choose from a number of global data suppliers such as issuers, registrars and information agents. This ensures the best fit for their needs, as well as providing additional control over data and operational costs. In turn, data is subjected to a detailed mapping process by S&P Global Market Intelligence’s team of over 100 corporate actions specialists to normalize and consolidate announcement information. This enhances vendor records and resolves conflicting information, so that clients can use a single golden record for corporate actions.

To ensure that MCA retains timely notifications, the firm has implemented multiple processes, including monitoring of exchanges for late announcements, easy-to-understand narratives for complex events, and projected Japanese and Korean dividends.

MCA is managed by a team of experts that offer coverage in 20 languages across nine locations, serving the top 10 asset managers in the world. Support is provided 24/6, utilizing a follow-the-sun model.

WHAT’S TO COME

S&P Global Market Intelligence’s has a number of developments planned for its MCA solution, including: 

Derivatives: Expanding data coverage and content by integrating with 55 plus exchanges to cover more than 95% of equity contracts issued globally

Crypto assets: Providing CA information on crypto assets

CA reference data: Helping clients to maintain the information they need for trading decisions and providing an overview of their trade universe

Environmental, social and governance (ESG): Enabling clients to integrate ESG factors as a component and facilitating informed decisions on share recalls

Model updates: Using technologies such optical character recognition, natural language processing and machine learning to enhance models and collect, read, parse and process non-standardized event notices and documents in languages other than English

WHY THEY WON

S&P Global Market Intelligence adds the best corporate actions data provider category to its palmarès by virtue of its acquisition of IHS Markit and its Managed Corporate Actions offering. The platform is designed to significantly streamline the ingestion and management of corporate actions data by offering user firms a single, central source of validated corporate actions data and eliminating the need for them to subscribe to multiple data sources and carry out their own data cleansing.