The true scale of the challenge
Corporate actions processes are far more complex than most industry participants acknowledge, and the cost of that complexity is already well baked in. Our research highlights that a single corporate event can involve up to 36 distinct interactions just at the issuer level, passing through multiple departments, agents, and advisors before reaching investors.
From issuer to CSD: The upstream cost of announcing a corporate event
This complexity compounds exponentially downstream, where a typical corporate event triggers over 110,000 interactions across financial institutions, totalling an extraordinary 16 billion interactions annually.
Visualizing this complexity as a journey, consider how an event must travel from an issuer to an investor, such as a mutual fund. Starting from the issuer, the corporate action moves through their agent, onto the depository, then to a depository participant. It may then pass through a global custodian, followed by a fund company, before finally reaching the mutual fund itself. This simplified route doesn’t even account for other critical participants like trustees, outsource providers, fund accountants, and data vendors, each adding layers of interaction and potential risk.
From CSD to the owner: How many people have to handle a corporate event before it reaches a mutual fund
Inside the firm: where are those interactions?