The new service, built and developed by ASX, allows straight-through delivery of corporate actions announcements to clients within seconds of the announcement being made to the broader market. The implementation by BNP Paribas in September underlines its commitment to bringing digital innovations to its clients.

The ASX service represents the first step towards a fully automated end-to-end solution, removing many of the inefficiencies that exist in the processing of corporate actions.

Luc Renard, head of Financial Intermediaries and Corporate clients, Asia Pacific at BNP Paribas Securities Services, said: "Working with the ASX, we are the first custodian able to send our clients their corporate action notices within seconds, rather than hours. This latest enhancement is part of our Augmented Custody programme, which is designed to make our custody processes more efficient, and complements the work we are currently undertaking to manage the corporate actions announcement process using blockchain technology.”

ASX is among the first exchanges in the world to support ISO 20022, the latest international securities messaging standard for corporate actions. As part of a number of major initiatives in the post-trade space, ASX is enhancing its ISO 20022 offering to capture and disseminate all corporate action events. ReferencePoint is ASX’s flagship reference data and corporate action service, used widely by trading participant back-offices, information vendors, and other data distributors.
David Raper, Executive General Manager, Trading Services at ASX, said: “ASX is setting the pace for providing straight-through processing for issuer announcements, and the fact that BNP Paribas is the first custodian in Australia to embrace this new technology confirms the team’s reputation for innovation.
“We are delivering the highest levels of performance with real-time corporate action event processing and message standardisation to improve efficiencies throughout the post-trade cycle. ReferencePoint enables clients to reduce complexity and simplify their post-trade processes.”