ISSA Corporate Actions Working Group

The WG held its kick-off meeting on January 6, 2009 under the name ISSA Asset Servicing WG and was renamed to ISSA Corporate Actions WG in early 2010.

The objectives of the WG are:

1. To expedite and leverage the implementation of global best practices already developed for corporate actions, income processing and possibly proxy voting (relying largely on work done in existing industry initiatives), and to identify critical issues requiring improvement.
   
   
2. To define detailed best practice recommendations for the avoidance of risk in corporate actions with options.

The two work streams are tackled sequentially; priority is with stream 1.

Progress:

The group reviewed a proposed inventory of current industry initiatives that are relevant to the project and represent its starting point. The core team will initially focus on drafting best practice with input from Europe and North America, and then take the discussion to additional parties and geographic regions.
The next step is to conduct a detailed review of existing work to highlight items which could have global applicability, and items requiring more detailed work.

In January 2010 the group published a set of proposed global principles for handling corporate actions and asked its members and interested parties to comment, and to help gather information on local or regional market initiatives in the field of corporate actions.

The final report (divided into a main document and an annex part) was published in May 2010 and formally announced to the members of ISSA during the 15th ISSA Symposium on June 3, 2010. The third element, i.e. the consolidated feedback to the market survey carried out as part of the project, was published in June 2010.

Downloads:

> ISSA Corporate Actions Information Sharing Platform


> Members of the Working Group