Corporate Actions Change Maker Forum 2024: Driving Automation in Corporate Actions

Dive deep into transformative projects led by industry trailblazers

View the key highlights in the recent webinar from the second of our three-part webinar series produced in association with The ValueExchnage entitled: The Corporate Actions Change Maker Forum. In this webinar, industry experts discuss the structure of the corporate actions team at BlackRock, the challenges they face, and how they use technology to streamline their operations. The speakers also discuss the importance of industry standardization and the role of AI in improving operational workflow.

Key speakers

• Chris Thiebaut, U.S. Head of Corporate Actions at Blackrock
• Jatan Pathak, Senior Product Manager, Corporate Actions at S&P Global Market Intelligence
• Martin Lawrence, The ValueExchange (Moderator)

Agenda

• Structure of the corporate actions team at BlackRock
• Challenges faced by the team
• The role of AI and technology in operations
• Importance of industry standardization

3 Key Takeaways

1: Streamlining the corporate action process with technology

The panelists emphasized the importance of utilizing technology to streamline the corporate action process. The key to this is using a centralized platform that combines people, processes, and systems to support end-to-end investment management processes.

2: Overcoming challenges with automation and standardization

While acknowledging the benefits of automation, the panelists discussed several challenges that must be overcome to fully realize these benefits. A key issue is the lack of industry standardization, which can create inconsistencies and inefficiencies in the corporate action life cycle.

3: The future of corporate action automation

The panelists shared their perspectives on how disruptive technologies will shape the future of corporate action automation. They highlighted the importance of improving the interoperability between systems and the potential benefits of artificial intelligence (AI) in identifying and addressing operational risks.

Other Insights include:

• There is a lack of industry standardization in corporate action processing which creates inefficiencies.
• Despite technological advancements, there are still manual processes involved in corporate actions which increase risk.
• AI can help in identifying exceptions and focusing on where the risk is.
• The integration into a single system really allows for the real-time access of data and decision making for all stakeholders.
• One of the big significant challenges is the lack of industry standardization.
• Despite all of the advances in technology, we still have events that that we need to submit physical paperwork to be able to participate.
• There was not a panel that doesn’t have a significant discussion around how AI can improve or enhance the operational, the operational workflow.

Watch these snippets from the full panel discussion to learn more about how BlackRock has been managing its corporate actions processes globally using internal resources; and how they have optimized their operations by leveraging external providers of managed services for corporate actions processing.

Learn more about BlackRock’s digital transformation journey from the following recordings of the full panel discussion provided below: