Best corporate actions managed service—S&P Global Market Intelligence

Product overview—Managed Corporate Actions (incorporating E2E and AVS)

As financial services firms seek to optimize asset servicing, reduce their operating costs and enhance scalability, S&P Global Market Intelligence’s end-to-end (E2E) Managed Corporate Actions service offers a solution to help them achieve those objectives. The service is designed to streamline corporate actions announcement scrubbing, reducing operational risk and increasing efficiency. By outsourcing such functions to S&P Global, firms stand to benefit through increased levels of straight-through processing and operational scalability.

Secret sauce

S&P Global’s E2E offering incorporates the firm’s Agent Validation Service (AVS), which sources and validates custodian data against issuer event details to create an accurate golden record. By leveraging S&P Global’s Managed Corporate Actions data and software, clients can automate manually intensive processes and eliminate errors with their corporate actions processing. AI-driven validation, automated event scrubbing and a four-eye approval process ensure accuracy and transparency.

Recent milestones

• E2E launched with a large financial services firm and was validated through a successful minimum viable product, with multiple clients live on the AVS
• Met all regulatory and service organization controls compliance standards
• Developed a number of key differentiators, including a conflict resolution engine and document/email parsing
• Unveiled integration support for client-specific workflows/customization needs
• Achieved over 90% automation for voluntary and mandatory events during early pilots
• Realized more than 60% internal cost savings and significantly fewer reconciliation errors
• Reduced downstream breaks by an estimated 95% through automated processing.

Future objectives

• Achieve full operational readiness for clients within the first four months for E2E
• Expand AI and machine learning automation for event validation, scrubbing and quality checks
• Extend application programming interface connectivity to support real-time data access and processing
• Enhance analytics and risk intelligence for improved decision-making and resilience
• Optimize workflows through deeper integration with corporate actions processing platforms, enabling greater efficiency and scalability across the life cycle.

Why S&P Global Market Intelligence won

S&P Global Market Intelligence maintains its impressive run of form in the IMD & IRD Awards by winning the category for Best corporate actions managed service, the first time this category has been on offer in these awards. The firm’s success is down to its outstanding Managed Corporate Actions offering, incorporating its AVS and E2E services, which together allow users to source and validate custodian data against issuer event details to create a corporate actions golden record. We’ve said it before, but it’s worth noting again, that corporate actions processing—traditionally a manually intensive and therefore error-prone function within even the largest and best resourced buy-side firms—is unlikely to set pulses racing across the industry, even though it is critical for firms to get absolutely right. To that end, S&P Global’s Managed Corporate Actions service manages the bulk of the complexity and heavy lifting for its clients around the processing of corporate actions, freeing them to focus on higher-value tasks such as making the most informed and transparent investment decisions on behalf of their end-investors.