Financial Market Data Web Services – Xignite Blog

Like the red-headed stepchild of reference data, corporate actions have been easy to neglect for many years, given the time, expense and difficulty of automation.  That is, until the financial crisis combined with globalization to turn corporate actions into a high-priority risk factor.  Like a red-headed stepchild turned Class A felon, corporate actions now threaten portfolios with greater risk than ever.

Before the crisis, globalization had already brought corporate actions to the breaking point.  Portfolios filled with a wide array of securities from companies around the globe naturally required a way to handle corporate actions from a wider array of companies adhering to a wider array of standards and regulations.  Let’s face it.  It’s not easy to build automated systems to handle an increasingly diverse set of data delivered through an ever more diverse set of technology standards.  So, it was easy for corporate action automation projects to fall off the bottom of the priority list.

But now, with the global financial crisis in full swing, the good old days of being able to neglect corporate actions appear to be over.  As companies seek to respond to the crisis, they’re issuing a flood of new corporate actions to reorganize, inject new capital, retain cash and accomplish a host of other creative financial solutions.  For investors and asset managers, it’s as if the red-headed stepchild is on a rampage, knocking over IT’s system building blocks, breaking analysts’ economic models for valuing securities, and generally making asset managers lose their hair.

I wish I could claim it was prophetic that we timed the release of XigniteCorporateActions to coincide with the up-surge in demand we’re seeing for automating corporate actions, but it was really more a matter of luck than foresight.  Still, it’s hard to imagine a time when on-demand financial web services for corporate actions data was needed more than right now.

So, if your red-headed stepchild has been begging to go to juvie in recent months, here’s a little tough-love parenting tip:  Don’t waste the next nine months trying to build your own data management prison to contain your corporate actions problems.  Just dial the Xignite emergency number and ask for an on-demand web service that can lock up your corporate actions problems in a matter of weeks instead of months.