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Do we have to have the US spelling of "licence".

Chris

I agree entirely with your analysis as I too spent a great deal of time dealing with corporate action notifications. However, a digital notary is not the answer as this does not get to the root of the problem. A whole industry has grown up to cleanse and golden copy the data (usually structured theses days either ISO15922 or ISO20022) but has never sorted out the root cause problem.

This is that the Issuers (or rather the PIPS) publish this data as raw text without structure. The problems arise downstream when a myriad of intermediaries such as data providers, custodians and sub-custodians introduce transcription errors when keying the raw data into a structured format. These the get exponentially magnified as each of them sends out notifications to their clients.

The LSE which still accounts for some 70% of corporate action notifications provides its issuers with a template to publish the notice. Why has this template not been amended so that issuer input would produce structured output. Together with Gary, I have been banging on about this for the past decade, but still no action.

The regulators, in the form of the UK Listing Authority, should mandate that every public company must issue all regulatory news in a structured format.

In the US they have grasped this and the DTCC now mandates that all corporate notifications are published in XBRL format (in conjunction with SWIFT and XBRL-US) so the technology is there it just needs the will to do it.

I demonstrated this in action nearly ten years ago and found then, probably as now, that the people who understand the problem and its consequences have little or no clout when it comes to allocating budgets and getting consensus for industry-wide initiatives. Unfortunately, corporate actions come a long way down the pecking order when other more high-profile projects are considered

This is not a cash versus electronic payment argument as most cash is obtained electronically, it is a problem of having a single point of failure - a card. If you had more than one card in your wallet, you would be inconvenienced but not incapable of paying. So, if the new electronic wallets are trying to get us to put all our card details in a single place they are introducing a potential single point of failure. I will always retain multiple methods of payment, whether it be cash or card.