Call For Papers
Corporate Actions - The STP Challenge

The SWIFT Institute invites proposals for research on the challenges of achieving STP (straight-through-processing) for corporate actions, and possible solutions on overcoming these challenges.

Despite the efforts and advancement in achieving STP from pre-trade to post-trade financial transactions, Corporation Action Processing remains as one of the most manual-driven and risk-prone financial activities in the global capital market. It is known that the manual intervention operation combined with the complexity and high-frequency of corporate action events inevitably leads to high cost and an increase in the likelihood of operational risk.

To address this problematic area, industry initiatives, such as Securities Market Practice Group (SMPG), Corporate Actions Joint Working Group (CAJWG) and the International Securities Services Association (ISSA), have been working towards to the identification of critical issues and the development of standardised market practices associated with streamlining corporate action communication flows involving all aspects of the processing chain. But challenges still remain to make a business case for corporate action automation, compliance with local and global market practices, as well as data quality problems of corporate actions. The industry itself continually points to structured data directly from the issuer or agent source as being the area that would have the biggest impact on corporate actions process improvement.

TOPICS: Research proposals can be theoretical or empirical, and should examine industry and regulatory developments in enabling or inhibiting the challenges and their solutions in the context of STP for corporate actions. The focus of the research could look at the following (other suggestions are welcome):
- What is the impact on financial performance and a firm's reputation resulting from failures in handling corporate action events?
- What are the institutional and regulatory barriers / enablers for corporate action automation? Analyse difference and variance of corporate action processing models/practices in different securities markets. Analyse the regulatory and economic impact in different securities markets
- Using empirical examples, compare and contrast between good and poor market practices in corporate action automation
- Identify bottlenecks in streamlining corporate action processing across the corporate action life cycle
- Analyse the impact of messaging standards (e.g. ISO 15022 / ISO 20022, XBRL, etc.) on corporate action automation
- Analyse whether market infrastructures (e.g. DTCC, T2S, etc.) could drive the streamlining of processes and adoption of standards

GRANT & WORKING PAPER: A grant of EUR 15,000 will be awarded to the author of the selected proposal. 50% will be paid immediately; the remaining 50% will be paid on acceptance of a working paper.

PAPER SUBMISSION PROCEDURE: Please submit your research proposal as follows: 1. CV/bio including education, work history, research experience, publications, etc.
2. Description of your research project (2,500 words maximum) to include the following:
- Objective of your research
- Methods by which you intend to undertake your research
- Timeframe by which you intend to complete your research

By email in MS Word/Excel/PowerPoint format and/or pdf.

DEADLINE: Proposals must be submitted no later than 2nd October 2013
EMAIL: Send submissions to: peter.ware@swift.com