The Importance of Quality Corporate Actions Data 

Your ability to report market changes quickly and correctly is crucial to your success. And reliable reporting starts with your access to timely and accurate information about corporate actions.

Whether you’re an institutional asset manager, wealth manager, or working in the fintech space, you can’t perform any other tasks within the investing lifecycle without first capturing corporate actions. These shifts not only impact client portfolios and internal trading strategies, but they have profound tax implications as well. In other words, without a firm foundation built on solid data, the entire investing process may be compromised. 

In financial services, you’re only as reliable as your information.

Accurately and promptly tracking corporate actions such as dividend payouts, stock splits, and other corporate events is essential to maintaining an accurate security master of your client’s portfolios, which is critical for informed investment decisions. It’s also one area where legacy technology that relies on manual inputs can lead to inefficiencies in operations and investment processes. Without the latest technology, it’s harder to scale your business and provide the competitive edge your clients have come to expect. 

Just think about some of the higher-profile recent corporation actions where accurate real-time data was essential to not just your role, but also to alerting investors downstream: since its IPO, Starbucks has split 2:10 six times; Google abruptly changed its name and its ticker symbol to Alphabet in 2015. These are marquee stocks. But what about the plethora of Equities, ETFs, and Mutual Funds?  Accurate management requires a systematic way to keep track of all events, newsworthy or not.  

The Importance of Quality Corporate Actions Data 

There are many different global corporate actions and dividend data providers in the industry today. The problem is that not all providers are equal. The best data feeds provide real-time data that is monitored, validated, and customized to meet users’ needs. For instance, QUODD’s corporate actions and dividend data solution covers 50 event types, including name changes, ticker changes, stock splits, mergers, acquisitions, delistings, reorganizations, cash, and stock dividends. It’s also flexible: managers can customize data sets and output formats based on exchanges or events, or get a full universe delivery based on a specified list of securities. 

Here’s how accurate, timely, verified corporate action data can help you.

For portfolio managers. Collecting and reporting corporate actions requires intelligence and precision. If your platform uses legacy technology from a traditional data vendor, or relies on collecting changes via email announcements and processing them manually, that’s a major time drain and opportunity to introduce errors. 

That’s just for current events. But what about when you need a look back? 

When crafting sophisticated algorithms, fund and portfolio managers may need data that’s adjusted historically to test out their trading strategies. QUODD can provide the historical data to back test an investment strategy, helping you to continuously enhance trading strategies. 

For wealth managers. For estate planning professionals at trusts, banks, credit unions—and even law firms—technology that automates and streamlines the flow of corporate action data can be a tremendous time and work saver. Automation enables you and your clients to have the highest degree of confidence that events are properly reflected in portfolios for both individual stocks and mutual funds. When technology systematically tracks dividend and distribution payouts, trust in your services escalates. Everyone is fully in the know about what’s held, under what symbol, what dividend payouts are coming.

Wealth managers must be aware of changes to dividend yields before they can offer tax-savvy investment ideas. If even one change in a dividend payout goes unrecorded, it can have major tax implications for investors. 

For recordkeepers. As the volume of corporate actions increases each year, even the sharpest recordkeepers may have difficulty managing and reporting each individual event. 

More than ever, recordkeepers managing the security master of a portfolio need a timely and comprehensive way to track every corporate action. Their precision and efficiency impacts the accuracy of distributions and payouts to downstream clients. Providing correct and up-to-the-minute investment information is ultimately what defines the quality of your client servicing. 

By being ahead of the information dissemination curve, you preemptively avoid clients calling about a stock split or name change on their statements. Plus, with a validated, real-time data stream, you can eliminate potential errors and reporting lags, and avoid the embarrassment—and hint to the trust bestowed on you—along with the flood of calls that come with having to issue retractions based on bad information.

For everyone. Retail trading applications, such as RobinHood and WeBull, have their own continuous need for reliable, timely information on dividends and corporate actions—critical information that needs to be delivered automatically to users. Subscribers using these increasingly popular new trading technologies rely on being fed up-to-the-minute information to determine their cash positions and next trading moves.

Superior service, informed decisions, accurate records: the case for QUODD

No one in the financial services ecosystem wants their users to find contradictory information elsewhere, or for their clients to be surprised by what shows up in their portfolio. 

QUODD’s Global corporate actions and dividend data solution helps you maintain security master databases and track all dividend payouts. With flexible licensing agreements and user-friendly technology, there’s no better way to access reliable data on corporate actions—and act on it quickly—than by making QUODD’s global corporate actions and dividend data solutions part of your data intelligence arsenal. An automated process that speeds up delivery while reducing costs and mitigating human error can help take your decision-making and service to the next level. Ready to streamline your operations and automate corporate actions? Contact QUOOD today.