Four market data vendors have signed up to a pilot programme aimed at enabling commercial providers of corporate actions announcements to deliver data in the ISO 15022 format over SwiftNet. The London Stock Exchange has also moved to offer its clients the choice of receiving corporate actions notifications in this way.
The four vendors participating in the pilot trials are: FT Interactive Data, Reuters, Telekurs Financial Information and WM Datenservice. Others are in discussion, says Swift.
Corporate actions processing has traditionally been predicated by multiple proprietary standards and feeds, and with this move Swift hopes to improve the automation and standardisation of asset servicing processes.
"Structured messaging alone offers the potential for increased STP and, more importantly, risk reduction by diminishing the possibility of misinterpreting announcements," says Norman Evans, corporate actions product specialist at HSBC Global Investor Services. "The benefits of automating current manual processes have the potential to deliver significant cost savings. This is an exciting first step towards the greater automation of corporate actions processing."