A roadmap to achieving STP for corporate actions

Abstract

Unlike other areas of the financial services industry, such as trading or settlement, the automation of a corporate action throughout its lifecycle — from announcement, through election, to entitlement and payment — has not yet been realised. The straight-through processing (STP) rates, which indicate the degree of automation, for corporate actions are poor and the management of corporate actions data remains highly manual. The result is that corporate actions are risky and costly — even simply getting hold of good, 'clean' data that is comprehensive is very challenging. Can a roadmap that achieves high STP rates for announcements be built and realised? This paper argues that for the USA — the largest market in the world, covering about 65 per cent of all global corporate action volume alone — the answer is 'yes', and the course has already been set.