BST Awards 2025: Best buy-side corporate actions platform—S&P Global Market Intelligence

Overview

S&P Global Market Intelligence’s Managed Corporate Actions (MCA) service is designed to address one of the buy side’s biggest challenges: the complexity of capturing, validating and processing corporate actions events across multiple sources and markets. Firms struggle with inconsistent data, missed deadlines and compliance risks that impact trading, settlement and client reporting functions. MCA provides buy-side firms with a single, structured  and validated feed of global corporate actions, alleviating their operational burdens and ensuring accuracy, timeliness and consistency across front- to back-office processes.

The solution  

MCA ingests corporate action announcements from a range of issuers, including exchanges, agents and vendors, normalizes the data into standard formats, applies validation checks, and delivers a golden-source feed ready for downstream systems. S&P Global’s operations team manages exceptions and enriches announcements with critical details. The service supports all asset classes and covers the entire lifecycle, from announcement to completion, enabling buy-side firms to reduce their operational workload, minimize their risk and meet their compliance and reporting requirements with confidence.

Secret sauce  

MCA’s uniqueness lies in its end-to-end managed service model, combining technology with operational expertise. Unlike point solutions, MCA fully integrates into client workflows, delivering structured events in standardized formats with global coverage. Its real-time processing, multi-source validation and exception management ensure high levels of accuracy. MCA goes beyond data delivery, acting as an extension of client operations teams, enabling buy-side firms to focus on investment decisions while relying on a trusted, outsourced corporate actions partner.

Recent milestones

MCA recently:

• Expanded coverage for voluntary events across Asia-Pacific
• Introduced automation for complex cross-border mergers
• Enhanced machine learning capabilities to improve announcement classification and multilingual processing, accelerating global timeliness
• Launched a new Event Summary offering, delivering clear, client-ready narratives of events
• Introduced a new workflow dashboard providing clients with improved visibility into data quality and status

These innovations have helped enhance MCA’s ability to deliver accurate, timely and user-friendly corporate actions data.

Future objectives

In the next year, MCA will expand to cover open-ended fund events such as fee updates, closures and policy changes. AI-drive enrichment will simplify complex event interpretation, while deeper integration with regulatory reporting will strengthen MCA’s compliance support. S&P Global is investing in a streaming service to prepare buy-side firms for 24/7 trading, alongside enhanced APIs, dashboards and broader global coverage, ensuring clients receive complete, accurate and timely corporate actions data across all asset classes.

Why they won

S&P Global Market Intelligence’s first of three individual category wins in this year’s Buy-Side Technology Awards is thanks to its impressive Managed Corporate Actions (MCA) service. Like a raft of other traditional back-office functions, corporate actions processing is unlikely to provide any buy-side firm with an opportunity to carve out a competitive advantage and yet it is a critical function that all firms need to manage efficiently, accurately and transparently. To that end, MCA does exactly that by redefining how buy-side firms manage one of their most operationally complex challenges. It delivers a fully managed, end-to-end offering that combines automation, machine learning and operational expertise, allowing buy-side firms to produce a single, validated “golden source” of corporate actions data. 

By integrating across front-to-back-office workflows, MCA helps firms eliminate data inconsistencies, reduce the chances of missing important deadlines, and minimize laborious and complex compliance risks. Recent innovations such as expanded Asia-Pacific coverage, automation of cross-border mergers and AI-driven multilingual processing have helped further enhance the accuracy, timeliness, and transparency of MCA’s corporate actions processing functionality. The addition of Event Summaries and interactive dashboards deliver further clarity and control for clients, while MCA’s managed service model helps transform corporate actions management from a resource-intensive burden into a function allowing buy-side firms to operate with greater confidence, efficiency and regulatory assurance.