Executive Summary
For a decade, the asset servicing industry’s roadmap seemed clear: invest in core platforms, implement ISO 20022 standards, and efficiencies would follow. Progress, however, has been uneven. While top-tier custodians and brokers have sought to build strong engines for mandatory events, the wider ecosystem, including proxy voting, tax reclaims, and complex voluntary events, is straining under the pressure of a 25% year-on-year surge in volumes.
This report, developed by The ValueExchange, sponsored by Broadridge and ISSA, reveals the market faces not only a growth challenge, but a scalability and confidence gap. Clients demand real-time accuracy and transparency, yet operations teams continue to grapple with inconsistent data, manual workarounds, and fragmented workflows.
Today’s asset servicing reveals a fragile ecosystem and a landscape full of contradictions. Despite record spend on technology, automation rates are falling in critical areas such as voluntary events, particularly for brokers. Event volume is surging, in particular across Asia where volumes are rising at twice the pace of other regions. Yet resourcing remains flat and 41% of firms have reduced system budgets just as workloads peak. Data quality dominates the agenda, but trust in that data continues to falter as up to 67% of asset servicing errors are data driven.
This report confirms what many market participants have long recognised; that the asset servicing industry has reached a tipping point.
ll
Despite being considered routine, mandatory corporate actions remain 35 % manual and 64 % error‑prone - proof that real STP is still unrealised."
Demi Derem, SVP, Investor Communication Solutions International, Broadridge
The traditional fix of adding people to paper over the cracks is no longer sustainable. The scope of the challenge has broadened.
Today’s corporate actions are more complex and interdependent than ever, consuming over half of all asset servicing resources amplifying risk across tax, securities lending, and sustainability processes. Yet persistent manual processing, even for routine events, reveal the limits of a lack or even partial automation and the urgency of data‑driven ‘straight-through processing’ (STP). Survival now depends on achieving end-to-end issuer-to-investor lifecycle automation via golden source data, standardisation and modular connectivity that scales capacity without scaling cost.
However, the obstacle is no longer just technology; it is trust and accountability. Automation founded on trusted data is both achievable today, and essential for the industry’s future resilience and scalability.
But the challenges should not be underestimated. Issuer‑to‑investor automation requires a shared commitment from issuers, intermediaries, and technology partners to define ownership and liability so that accurate, source‑level data can flow seamlessly through the value chain. Until data confidence and issuer engagement improve, the industry will remain caught in a cycle of rising costs, stagnant efficiency, and recurring errors.
