Developing a straight-through process for corporate actions in Australia

Abstract

Corporate actions processing is widely acknowledged to be one of the remaining areas of back-office processing to achieve automation or straight-through processing (STP). There are many reasons for this and recognition that this largely manual work creates significant risk and cost for various stakeholders. Over the past few years a number of market infrastructures have made inroads to automate corporate actions announcements and processing. This paper looks at the role the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) plays in the Australian market, and its project to introduce STP for corporate actions. The paper will explore the current challenges in corporate actions processing, how ASX approached the project, and the solution and key benefits for the industry. ASX will implement phase 1 of this project in September 2014.