Corporate actions might not make front-page headlines but, behind the scenes, they represent one of the biggest and most persistent costs in global finance. Every year, the industry spends an estimated $58 billion managing and processing corporate actions. Even more concerning is that costs are rising by around 10 per cent each year, whilst automation remains below 40 per cent. A closer look at Citi’s 2025 Asset Servicing Report highlights the scale of the challenge. On average, each corporate action now involves more than 110,000 firm interactions and costs $34 million to complete. Yet, despite advances in technology and data infrastructure, around 75 per cent of firms still depend on manual validation. The challenges around inefficient handling of corporate actions has to be one of the clearest opportunities for blockchain technology to deliver a genuine, measurable impact. The current process is fragmented, outdated and unnecessarily expensive. It depends on disconnected systems, unstructured data and layers of intermediaries that slow things down and increase the risk of error. In a market that is rapidly moving towards real-time operations and digital assets, this model is no longer sustainable.
Challenges around corporate actions
Source: Chainlink
The scale of the problem
Recent industry initiatives, such as the Chainlink-led project involving Swift, DTCC, UBS, ANZ, DBS Bank and TMX, have shown just how inefficient today’s approach has become. Their findings revealed an over-reliance on manual handling, duplicated effort and inconsistent data flows that lead to widespread reconciliation problems. With automation rates below 40 per cent, the industry
spends billions each year simply verifying and correcting the same information across multiple systems. Each intermediary in the chain interprets and reprocesses corporate actions data in its
own way, introducing further inconsistencies. What should be a straightforward communication of facts about an event a dividend, merger or stock split, too often becomes a complex and costly web of back-and-forth confirmations. In many cases, essential data is buried in PDF attachments, emails or proprietary file formats that require human intervention to extract and interpret. The result is inefficiency, duplication and a constant risk that one participant’s version of the truth doesn’t match another’s.
What S&P Global and other leaders are showing
Despite these challenges, there are promising signs of progress. S&P Global has been one of the most active and influential organisations driving modernisation in this space. Its unified corporate actions solution now covers three million securities across 170 countries, proving that automation and accuracy at scale are achievable. The results are impressive. S&P Global’s managed services have achieved 95 per cent straight-through processing (STP) for mandatory events and over 85 per cent STP for voluntary ones. Manual intervention has fallen by 90 per cent, total cost of ownership has been cut by 35 per cent, and service accuracy now exceeds 99.8 per cent. For a process historically prone to discrepancies and delays, those numbers represent a transformation. S&P Global has also collaborated with DTCC and other market participants to automate the ingestion and validation of corporate announcements. These efforts all point towards one clear conclusion: the future of corporate actions lies in verified, standardised and automatically distributed data. As S&P Global states: “Our unified corporate actions solution helps firms across a range of asset classes, market client types, and business lines reduce their risk and automate, strengthen and accelerate their corporate actions processing.”
Moreover, the financial services industry needs to move beyond fragmented, siloed systems towards a single, trusted network for data sharing, reporting and resilience. Corporate actions are a perfect case study for how such an approach can deliver tangible results. What is required for real, long-term change, revolves around three key principles:
· data standardisation - every corporate action should be represented in a common, machine-readable format. This removes the need for manual data entry and reconciliation, ensuring consistency across asset managers, custodians and regulators. Structured, standardised data is the foundation of efficient automation.
· consensus and verification - each corporate action should be validated by trusted participants who cryptographically attest to its accuracy. Once verified, the data becomes a single, immutable source of truth accessible to all authorised parties in real time. This eliminates the endless cycles of checking, comparing and revalidating data that currently dominate the process.
· interoperability and governance - is an infrastructure that supports both public and private blockchain environments, allowing institutions to maintain control and privacy while participating in a shared network. Our own governance framework clearly defines the roles of data contributors, attestors and verifiers, ensuring accountability and transparency across the entire lifecycle of a corporate action.
These principles together create a framework for a more resilient, accurate and efficient market infrastructure one that aligns with global standards such as ISO 20022 and is ready to support the growth of digital and tokenised assets.
Building a better system together
The benefits of this approach are far-reaching. A single verified record for each corporate action dramatically reduces errors and operational risk. It enables faster settlement, lower costs and more reliable reporting. For asset managers, custodians and regulators, it means fewer breaks and greater transparency. For investors, it means greater trust in how their holdings are managed and represented. As more financial instruments move on-chain, tokenised equities and bonds will need to reference the same confirmed corporate actions data as their traditional counterparts, ensuring seamless synchronisation between traditional systems and blockchain-based ones. The recent Chainlink-led collaboration has already shown the potential of combining AI and blockchain. Using large language models such as OpenAI’s GPT, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude, the project successfully extracted structured data from unstructured corporate action announcements in multiple languages, achieving nearly 100 per cent consensus accuracy. These records were transformed into ISO 20022-compliant messages and distributed across both traditional networks such as Swift and blockchain ecosystems such as DTCC’s. The introduction of cryptographic attestation roles where participants digitally sign data to confirm its validity created an auditable chain of custody for every event. The result is a unified “golden record” for each corporate action, accessible in real time to all authorised systems. For the first time, the industry has demonstrated that AI can interpret complex data consistently, and blockchain can ensure that data remains verifiable and accessible across platforms. Together, these technologies have the potential to save tens of billions of dollars annually while enabling a new era of automation and transparency.
The future of corporate actions
The transformation of corporate actions is about much more than cutting costs. It is about building resilience, improving transparency and restoring trust in the global financial system. In a landscape defined by real-time trading, tokenisation and cross-border digital assets, the ability to share verified data securely and instantly is not a luxury, it is a necessity. Firms that fail to adapt risk being left behind as regulators, investors and market participants increasingly expect faster, more reliable information flows. We are currently facing is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to rebuild how financial data moves through the system. By combining blockchain-based trust mechanisms with rigorous data standards and collaborative governance, we can finally remove the inefficiencies that have held back progress for decades. The momentum is already here. Global players such as S&P Global, DTCC, Swift and Chainlink have shown that the industry is ready to embrace new infrastructure models. The journey will not happen overnight, but with each collaborative step, each pilot, each data standard and each verified record, we move closer to a system where corporate actions become seamless, transparent and automated by design.
The £58 billion problem is real, but so is the opportunity to solve it.
This article first appeared in Digital Bytes (28th of October, 2025), a weekly newsletter by Jonny Fry of Team Blockchain.