But where to start? There is no single corporate action problem – as challenges vary by investment activity, event type, customer profile and asset class.

Yet some key points stand out. In Asia-Pacific, interacting with market infrastructures is simply too manual – creating risks and latency issues downstream. In North America, manual processes still outweigh system issues as a source of problems for practitioners – as paper-based market practices continue to make manual intervention unavoidable. Only in Europe are practitioners preoccupied more by system limitations than by manual processes.

In an age of such incredible innovation “it feels very 1980s” for us to still be struggling with such core issues. The path to progress is not entirely straight forward, but it begins with collaboration and standardisation – as corporate actions are an ecosystem challenge above all.

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Over 62% of practitioners around the world are paying out more than USD2million in corporate action errors. And the only thing that seems open to question is whether that number should be higher – especially if you include the opportunity cost of (non-)elections.

But whilst provisioning and contingency funds may have made this tenable in the past, the events of 2020 have undermined our fragile corporate action infrastructures even further. Record numbers of events have begun to behave differently (becoming more complex and subjected to rescheduling, etc.), creating a major drain on scarce, manual expertise. At a time when regulation is driving us towards improved timeliness and transparency, corporate actions have risen to #1 in the investment agenda in 2021.

Today the costs of corporate action errors risk spiralling – driven not only by a shift in corporate action behaviours but also by a strong focus on highly complex business activities (such as prime brokerage and structured products). Change is needed to support this landmark change. Now.

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