Corporate Actions: Faxes Working Overtime

Too much time drinking the XBRL "cool-aid" can seriously damage your health, as can obsessing about the co-existence of ISO 15022 and ISO 20022 message formats, without dealing with today's issues of data management. 

As a collective industry, let's face it, we are still heavily process oriented towards the sending and receiving of fax notifications. While data vendor feeds are probably the most automated in the information flow, the risk ridden, error prone, manual fax notification process lies largely untouched.

The level-arch file and the fax machine still remain the tools of the trade for the majority of corporate actions departments today. With thousands of fax pages waiting to be processed each day there are some fairly basic operational issues that still need to be addressed.

Typically 70-80% of notifications received by asset managers are available in standard formats that could be automatically processed rather than 'stepping off' the fax gateway onto the print queue. Rather than the sender being at fault, this time it is the receiver of the notification who has become the weakest part of the information processing chain.

It seems a little strange that we would refuse to accept the risk around receiving prices, FX rates or other time sensitive information via fax, yet notifications for corporate actions are still the acceptable norm - yet they can open firms up to huge losses through missed deadlines.

So how about replacing those fax notifications and saving ourselves a lot of time, stress and risk?