Legacy systems, fragmented data, and limited change capacity remain the industry’s main obstacles to automation, especially in class actions (38%), and tax reclaims (36%). Yet, these are not the only constraints. Near term success will depend on tackling the full triad of platform, people and process.

The human element remains a double-edged sword: both enabler and impediment. One third of firms cite a lack of change-management capacity as the main hurdle for income events, with mandatory and voluntary events close behind at 27%. The human dependency – the solution to the ‘trust gap’ could also be the impediment to automating the flow.

Compounding the issue, even with numerous market standards in operation today, especially in Europe, event standardisation remains inconsistent. 24% of firms identify it as the top blocker, just behind people and change capacity. The result: voluntary corporate action events are among the hardest to automate, and even mandatory or income events remain exposed to manual interpretation.

As we have seen, scaling has not been achieved through big-bang system migration, but through tactical survival: hiring people to plug data gaps, fixing broken workflows, and outsourcing complex edge-cases to protect P&L.

Ultimately, data quality eclipses technology as the key barrier to automation. 58% of respondents cite data-related issues, far ahead of technology-related blockers (20%).

The most common culprit is poor announcement quality at source - identified by 42% of respondents as the reason mandatory events fail to achieve full automation. What should be a highly standardised and automated process is often undermined by inconsistent or incomplete data, which accounts for 64% of reported errors.

Until data is accurate and complete at source, automation risks simply replicating errors faster.

And considering data, upstream counterparty and provider variance compounds the problem for 22% of respondents. Non-standard data propagates through the entire value chain – from issuers (or their agents) through to the CSDs and other intermediaries down to the investors. So, it comes as no surprise that for 50% of investors, their top asset servicing wish is for reliable, standardised data across all markets i.e. the golden source. An ask echoed by 29% of exchange and technology providers and 17% of custodians.