Waters Rankings 2020: Best Corporate Actions Solutions Provider—SIX

Reliable, accurate corporate actions data is central to risk reduction and tracking changes that impact securities. But it’s not always easy to get it right, particularly as financial firms face increasing volumes of corporate actions—SIX processed over 8.4 million corporate actions in 2019 alone.

The company has continued to enhance its Flex solution since rolling it out in 2018, and takes this category in the Waters Rankings for the second year running. Over the past year, SIX has added formats to Flex that are simplified for ease-of-integration and the addition of French fiscal data, as well as making available a year’s worth of historical data. “In corporate actions, the greatest challenges are always around quality and timeliness of data, combined of course with the cost of that data,” says Laura Fuller, product content manager at SIX. “SIX continues to provide to our clients high-quality global data that has been fed in from a primary source wherever possible, collated and normalized with quality checks along the way, then delivered in various formats to promote straightforward integration into client systems.”

In the past year, SIX worked on improvements to its ISO 15022 service, and increased its engagement with standards bodies like the International Organization for Standardization. The ISO 15022 MT564 standardizes the delivery of corporate actions notifications. “This is a key delivery format for SIX, and client-led changes are important,” Fuller says.

SIX improved the presentation of cash flows in the ISO format, added French fiscal data on distributions and data on distribution interest components, as well as the Legal Entity Identifier (LEI), after an LEI field was added to the ISO standard in November 2019. “SIX aims to always conform to the rules of the ISO 15022 standard, as well as add optional changes where possible, such as the LEI addition,” she says.

Fuller says Flex will be expanded further over the next year, to make more data available. “Data quality continues to be a key focus, and SIX will be looking at further improvements in this area,” she says.