Standardising corporate actions has made progress, but differences in market practices, communication channels and data quality continue to stand in the way of true convergence. That was the message from the Sibos 2026 panel, One standard, many realities: the global future of corporate actions.
ISO 20022 is intended to provide a common framework for more automated and standardised corporate actions processing. But while the standard is global, its implementation is not always consistent.
“As of now, I’d say it’s a little fragmented,” said Adam Watson, managing director and head of Asset Services at DTCC, pointing to the continued need for market participants to map messages into different formats.
Christine Strandberg, head of Product Management Investor Services Banks at SEB, said some variation is inevitable. “Of course, you’re going to have language issues. Of course, you’re going to have dialects,” she said.
Common market rules and practises
But the challenge goes beyond the message format itself. Christian Houillon, global head of Custody Products & Solutions at BNP Paribas, said a functioning standard also requires common market rules and practices. ISO 20022 provides the common message standard, he said, but the other two elements still need work.
That becomes particularly important when the underlying data is inconsistent. Watson noted that 75% of voluntary corporate action events received in the US market require someone in operations to speak to the agent to understand the issuer’s intent before it can be structured.
The emergence of digital assets could offer another opportunity to rethink the process. Watson described tokenisation as a potential catalyst for better standards, but warned that without convergence, fragmentation could simply move from traditional rails to digital ones.
Ultimately, the panellists argued that standardisation will depend less on agreeing that standards are useful and more on getting the industry to adopt them. “We have a pretty good standard already, so let’s implement them,” Houillon said. For Watson, the incentive is clear: “Standardisation unlocks business value.”
Sibos 2026 plays out in Miami from 28 September to 1 October. We are there, view our coverage here.