IMD & IRD Awards 2023: Best corporate actions data initiative—S&P Global Market Intelligence

Overview

Managing corporate actions typically involves a number of manual processes. Financial services firms spend significant time reconciling and validating agent messages, drawing on multiple sources of information to do so. In addition to being resource-intensive and time-consuming, this manual approach is also error-prone. S&P Global Market Intelligence developed its corporate actions solution, AVS, after working with a number of customers to understand their key pain points across their corporate actions workflows.

The solution

AVS modernizes customers’ operational processes by replacing manual functions with automation to validate agent data. It is a managed service that enables companies to outsource the data-scrubbing process to S&P Global Market Intelligence’s corporate actions team, which reviews and validates data against the firm’s golden source corporate actions data. Not only does this improve STP rates, but the golden record of corporate actions that customers receive as part of this service provides a single source of truth for downstream announcements. As such, the need to vet records against agents is reduced, thereby improving the efficiency and time to market of corporate actions announcements.

Secret sauce

A key differentiator of the AVS is its change and governance board, which regulates the data validation process. The service’s team works with clients to highlight important events and explains complex processing requirements for upcoming corporate actions events. Clients can also customize their validation processes, deadline management, and narratives by market and event types.

AVS is driven by S&P Global Market Intelligence’s Managed Corporate Actions solution, an extensive source of validated corporate actions data. It is also supported by a global team of over 300 corporate actions specialists providing research, validation, and client support. The team works directly with over 90 validation agents worldwide to resolve data conflicts.

Recent milestones

• Over 200 financial services clients served worldwide during the course of 2022
• Validated data provided for almost 4 million equities, fixed income, and structured securities across more than 170 territories
• 99.96% accuracy on over 50 million announcements processed

Future objectives

• Expanding the API to publish golden record data to clients, with the aim of creating a standardized API solution
• Introducing machine learning into golden record data scrubbing, specifically with a view to improving the efficiency of narrative scrubbing
• Growing and strengthening the custodian network to move to a utility-based operating model
• Continuing to optimize the AVS user interface to provide greater data transparency to customers

Why they won

S&P Global Market Intelligence’s Agent Validation Service (AVS) has delivered the win in the best corporate actions data initiative category for New York-based S&P Global Market Intelligence. The processing of corporate actions messages is a part of the industry traditionally mired in manually intensive workflows and workarounds, which together increase processing times and operational risks. Key to AVS’s appeal is its business model: it is a managed service whereby S&P Global’s corporate actions team assumes the data scrubbing responsibility, after which it reviews and validates the data against clients’ golden source corporate actions data. The end result is a significant increase in STP rates, transparency and accuracy, allowing firms to redeploy resources to higher value tasks.