Operational Excellence Takes Experience in Corporate Actions

As the world of corporate actions continues to expand and evolve, there’s a growing need for stronger, more agile supporting processes. Often, the most cost-effective answer is to outsource the technology to an offshore provider. But in a complex processing environment, it can take more than generic IT knowhow to keep your operations up to speed.

Dividends aside, corporate actions events once happened mainly in smaller companies and local markets. Today, much larger, global companies are increasingly involved, making events much more complicated.

However, corporate actions remain unregulated and, in many cases, unknown events. So, it’s difficult to anticipate what type of events are going to be announced. And although digital technology vendors are making great strides to automate the corporate actions process, the constant data flux can be challenging to handle.

With ISO 15022 and 20022 standards being continually updated, SWIFT users must typically make ongoing enhancements to their internal systems at great expense, all while managing new capital and cost pressures. At the same time, there is increased demand from customers and investors to provide real-time information and immediate interaction through mobile devices.

That’s why we see more financial institutions moving their operational functions from in-house to outsourced environments. Many believe it’s the only sustainable way to maintain the technology structures they require to automate workflows and comply with ever-changing standards.

But critically, not all outsourced environments are the same – and institutions are beginning to appreciate the importance of outsourcing to providers that offer deep financial services experience and subject matter expertise in corporate actions, along with hosted technology.

With highly experienced operations and technology teams, these corporate actions “centers of excellence” also help firms capitalize on the fact that large portions of their operations are replicated across the industry.

The cleansing of corporate actions data, for example, adds zero value for an organization. The center of excellence can not only remove the burden of managing this non-differentiating process, but also support it more cost-effectively for multiple clients as a commoditized service.

In other words, outsourcing to a center of excellence is clearly the optimal way to make better use of constrained resources, meet shifting customer demands and handle relentless industry, business and technology change.

What better reasons are there to entrust your corporate actions operations to the most experienced provider?