- Person 1 - Andrew Delaney, Chief Content Office, A-Team Group
- Person 2 - Jonathan Waldinger, Product Owner for Corporate Actions, BNY Mellon
- Person 3 - Lawrence Conover, Vice President of Asset Services, Fidelity Investments
- Person 4 - Yogita Mehta, Head Corporate Actions, Financial Information, SIX
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Andrew Delaney, host: Thank you. [Music]
Hello, and welcome to A-Team’s webinar today. The topic is: How to gain operational efficiency in corporate actions processing. My name is Andrew Delaney, and I’m President and Chief Content Officer at A-Team Group, and I will be hosting today’s webinar.
I’m joined today by an esteemed panel of expert speakers. We have Jonathan Waldinger from BNY Mellon, Lawrence Conover from Fidelity Investments, and Yogita Mehta from SIX, our sponsor today—so thanks to SIX. I’ll ask each of them to introduce themselves in a moment, but before I do, a couple of messages first about how you can take part in today’s webinar.
To the right of the video on your screen, you’ll see a box for questions and polls. We’ll be running a few polls, including three quite early on, so we’d like your involvement by voting in these polls; that helps us gauge industry opinion and, of course, inform the discussion today. You’ll see when the polls are coming up, and hopefully we’ll get your participation.
We’ll also be using the same mechanism so you can ask questions to our experts. We’ll be taking questions throughout the webinar, so feel free to ask as they occur to you. Please add any question to the box under the Questions tab, just so we can keep this as interactive as possible.
Before we proceed, let me ask our panelists to introduce themselves. Jonathan, thanks for joining us today.
Jonathan Waldinger, BNY Mellon: Absolutely—thanks for having me. My name is Jonathan Waldinger. I represent BNY Mellon. I am the Product Owner for Corporate Actions within Custody Product Development. I’ve spent the last 15 years or so in the custody corporate actions space, and about seven-plus years managing efficiency-driven automation programs that target corporate actions and income processing.
Andrew Delaney, host: Fabulous—thanks again for coming on. Next up, Lawrence—welcome.
Lawrence Conover, Fidelity Investments: Good day—thanks for the opportunity. My name is Lawrence Conover. I’m a Vice President with Fidelity Investments in our Asset Services Group. I’ll leave out the number of years I’ve been involved in corporate actions and asset servicing.
Part of my motivation for being here and being involved is that I’ve been active with SIFMA in the US—the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association—and we’ve spent a lot of time trying to improve processing and really trying to create standards and automation. It’s a process that should not be this complicated, in my opinion, and I’m hoping we see progress over the years here.
Andrew Delaney, host: Very good—thanks again for joining us. Lastly, Yogita. Thank you, Yogita.
Yogita Mehta, SIX: Hello, Andrew—thank you for having me here. A bit of my background: I’m Yogita Mehta. I work as a Commercial Director for SIX Financial Information, which is part of the SIX Group. Like Lawrence, I’m going to skip the number of years I’ve been working in this space.
My background is split between financial information, as well as being part of the corporate actions world from a data and software perspective. My interest within this webinar would predominantly be to look at what challenges we are facing in this space—which are probably already known to all of us—and how we can solve some of these challenges, particularly through automation.
Andrew Delaney, host: Excellent—thank you. What we’re going to do today is start by setting the scene a little bit. We’re going to run a few quick-hit audience polls, which we’d like you to vote in. If we can get the first poll up and running, that would be great. Then we’ll ask the panelists to take a look at the results as they come in.
The first poll is asking: What percentage of corporate actions are processed manually within your organization? Your options are: sub-20%; 20% to 50%; more than 50%; or the oddball line—“We do not know what percentage of corporate actions are processed manually.” That’s the first question, so if I can get you to vote on that, that would be great.
I’m not actually seeing this poll at the moment, so I’m hoping that it’s up on your screens because I can’t see it. Great—it’s up. Excellent. Superb.
As I mentioned, if you can vote on that quickly, we can move on to the next poll. This poll is asking—in a little more detail—about the technology. What technology are you using to process corporate actions events? Is it our favorite Microsoft Excel? Is it some third-party corporate actions processing software? Or is it some kind of in-house solution that you have built? Those are the answers for the second poll.
Then we’ll move quickly to the last poll for now, and that one looks at the use of the internet. How often do you use the internet to source corporate actions data for market deadlines? Is it daily, weekly, monthly, or occasionally (by which we mean less frequently than monthly)?
If you just round out your voting now, we can start to look at some of those results and we can see what the panel thinks. Then we’ll move on to our next set of questions.
We’ll talk a little bit about what the panel thinks the landscape looks like in terms of how corporate actions are processed at major financial institutions, and then we’ll dig into—like Yogita was mentioning—how automation and other modernizing technologies can help streamline the process, as Lawrence mentions: something that perhaps should be more simple than it actually is now.
Maybe we can start by taking a look at the results here. This was the first poll, and we’re looking at: “We currently process 20% to 50% of corporate actions manually.” Interesting result: “We don’t know what percentage” is selected by a small number. Any thoughts on that? Is this what you would expect to see?
Lawrence Conover, Fidelity Investments: Yeah, I would probably say so. I mentioned the SIFMA organization, and last year there was actually a position paper that the group had published looking at standards and automation. As part of that, there was a survey done by The ValueExchange in 2021 that estimated that global corporate actions are 46% processed manually, globally.
Personally, I think it’s a little lower than that when you look at dividends and interest and redemptions. I think a lot of that is available; it’s more of the complex items.
Andrew Delaney, host: Very good. Anyone else got any thoughts on that particular poll?
Jonathan Waldinger, BNY Mellon: Yeah, I would agree. It’s kind of what I would expect. It’s definitely a mixed bag when you talk about event types and you talk about markets and so forth. So, to be around 50% is about what I would expect. Obviously, it’d be better if it was higher, right? In a perfect world, it would be a lot higher, but I think currently that’s probably right around where it is.
Andrew Delaney, host: Excellent. Great—okay, let’s move on to the results of the second poll. This one was looking at what technologies people use. Overwhelmingly: in-house solution. Is this what people thought they’d say? Yogita, what about you?
Yogita Mehta, SIX: I would have liked it to be a little bit less, so one would think that you would have slightly less in-house solution and more third-party solution—a bit of a balance. But what is pleasantly surprising is the fact that only 10% are saying that Microsoft Excel is being used, so that’s good, right? It’s a better journey toward automation in my mind.
The world has moved off Excel onto more…
Lawrence Conover, Fidelity Investments: It’s sort of dedicated and hopefully appropriate solutions one way or the other.
Andrew Delaney, host: Excellent. Good. So the final poll for now looked at internet usage—you know, how you use it to source corporate actions data. Perhaps not as frequently as what people might like. Would anyone want to comment on that?
Lawrence Conover, Fidelity Investments: I’ll just say that I’d be surprised that there are firms not using the internet daily. You know, I know it’s a valuable source, at least trying to find areas to look for, at least.
Andrew Delaney, host: Yeah. Yeah, okay. Excellent. Good. All right, well, let’s move on to our first set of questions, and then just remind the audience you can ask questions yourselves through the same box as used to vote.
So, first one—let’s kick off with you, Lawrence. A bit of a scene setter: How would you describe the current corporate actions processing at financial institutions? What’s the state of play?
Lawrence Conover, Fidelity Investments: Yeah, so I’m going to start off and say it this way: there’s a lot of fragmentation in corporate action announcement processing. I’ll make this comment that there really is no golden source copy of the data. And the reason I say that is all of the corporate action data is really obtained through interpretation.
Ideally, you’d like to have system feeds come in with everything, but when you look at how the initial data is actually published, it’s almost published in a manual nature. So even a simple dividend announcement is a publication by the board of directors; it’s usually a press release that’s out there. There are a lot of great service providers that easily pick this information up, and there are not a lot of discrepancies with that.
But when you start getting into the more complex offers, you’re really looking at a prospectus, right? It’s a hard copy booklet that could be over 100 pages, and there are a lot of event details and these complexities that are only found in that initial document if a service provider is not picking that up, or our custodian or a depository.
I’ll also say there’s a lot of duplicate processing when you look at how many players are actually involved in this. So you have an offering document, you have a transfer agent involved, right? You’re going to have your depository if you’re holding shares there; you may have a custodian bank; you may have a clearing firm; the broker-dealer that’s involved in it. Everyone is scrubbing this data, and everyone is essentially doing the same thing.
But you also have to factor in differences, right? So with all of this internal manual review, there may be things where not everything is supported, right? So you are going to get differences that are out there. When you’re comparing multiple sources, there are going to be discrepancies or exceptions that have to be resolved, and that’s where a lot of the effort is today—looking at those exceptions and just making sure we’re picking up those little details that are in complex offers.
Andrew Delaney, host: Because you’ve got the lack of consistency there or standardization, you’ve got different data quality issues, if you like, for incoming data, as well as different interpretations of the data that’s in front of people. So it makes life a little bit messy. Jonathan, is that how you see the world at the moment?
Jonathan Waldinger, BNY Mellon: Yeah, in fact, I would point to the lack of a true golden source copy as one of maybe the top three challenges we have in the industry. We see it now all the time. Our clients feel that pain. It’s something that we have to solve for almost daily. It’s one of those things where you really have to dig into the data, scrub the data, essentially find out: if you have two sources saying two different things, which one is right?
There’s only one way the offer is actually being processed. One might be 90% close; one might be actually the full package. So to make sense of that and scrub through that takes a lot of effort. I don’t want to say wasted, right, because at the end of the day it’s about servicing our clients, but it’s a lot of motion that shouldn’t necessarily have to go into that process. It should be: take information, process information, pass along to the next piece. To me, that’s one of the huge challenges.
But I would also point to differences between markets. So where you have an event that’s a global event and you have maybe three different markets that are processing it, the different mechanisms to actually say, get the instructions to the sub or to the depository, and what then, say, the provider has to do to manage all of that—that too is a big challenge in my opinion.
Andrew Delaney, host: Very good. Thank you very much. Okay, moving on—and we’ll stay with you, Jonathan, for this one—why should financial institutions be looking at how to invest in automation and other sort of modernizing processing technologies and techniques? What can they be doing? Why should they be doing it?
Jonathan Waldinger, BNY Mellon: This is a great question. So if we look at corporate actions processing as a whole, it’s a cost-center-driven business, right? It’s something that we’re doing for our clients. When we do it right, there’s not really a lot of noticing of how it’s happening—it’s, “Hey, it’s been done. You’re processing this large complex merger, this Dutch auction.” When we do it wrong and something comes up that starts costing the firm or costing the client, that’s where attention is paid.
So given that, and given that human error is what it is, we should look to automate in every possible way. It isn’t always that simple, right? Sometimes there are things that can’t be automated or they’re complex to automate. A lot of investment... you have to do a cost-benefit analysis in terms of the time versus the spend and so forth. But in my mind, taking the human element out of some of this processing, having it be automated, taking headcount, increasing efficiency—at the end of the day, it’s better for the client and it’s better for the firm as a result.
Andrew Delaney, host: So let’s bring you into the discussion. How do you see it? Why should people be looking at, you know, how to automate?
Yogita Mehta, SIX: I mean, it would be a shame if I didn’t bring up the operational efficiency aspect or the risk mitigation aspect, which we all know—but those are the critical drivers. But I think to me the biggest element coming in from a vendor perspective, the biggest element that we’ve observed is basically all the financial institutions are operating in silos. The bigger the organization, they are doing the same process that both Jonathan and Lawrence outlined multiple times within their organization.
So in an interesting way, the moment you go down that path of automation, you can bring all the different units which are actually collecting this data, scrubbing it, engineering a golden copy multiple times within the organization. And that’s definitely resulting in breaking down those silos, which would in turn result in cost efficiencies or even save some money along the way.
And also the other part that Lawrence brought about—or Jonathan brought about—there’s so much complexity because everybody’s trying to do it in their own way. I think automation will bring about a whole lot of harmonization and standardization across the industry because everybody will adhere to certain standards, and therein we will all operate on the same play, by the same yardstick or same rules. So to me, those are some of the main reasons why one should consider automation as a journey.
Andrew Delaney, host: Very good. Thank you. Right, we’re going to head back to the polls, and this will be our final one today. So if you would just...
Help us by voting now. This poll is looking at the challenges of automating and modernizing corporate actions processing at your organization. You can click multiple answers. So which of these four factors are on your mind? Is it a lack of management buy-in? Is it a shortfall of budget? Is it a shortage of required skills? Or is it cultural distance to change?
So as I say, you can tick as many boxes as are appropriate to your organization. While you are voting, let’s move on to our next question and I’ll pose this one to Lawrence. What are the challenges of automating and modernizing corporate actions processing as you see them, Lawrence?
Lawrence Conover, Fidelity Investments: Yeah, so I had previously mentioned that ValueExchange survey. Part of that also concluded that on average it actually costs financial services firms more to source the corporate action event than it does to actually process the event on behalf of our customers.
There’s probably a number of factors that are here. I don’t necessarily think it’s firm buy-in. You know, a lack of understanding and risk involved—I think just my experience, I think senior management is aware of the risk. So I’d be curious to see that poll results around that.
First, I think it’s the data, right? So we did talk, you know, I think for the third time now we said there is no golden source out there, but it’s also really a lack of standardization in the process. So when you look at the input of a life cycle, it does require getting all of the information—you know, the timing, the event disruption, the format, the overall content.
And if you’re getting that source, there’s a variety of ways of receiving that, whether it’s ISO 20022, there’s some XBRL formats, there might be some special feeds or even bespoke smart forms—but it’s not a consistent industry model.
So if you’re getting data from multiple sources, you need to be able to pull that together in a manner to compare that, make sure that that is the same data that’s out there. So really trying to bring that into your firm in a standardized format so that you can weigh if it’s accurate, if anything’s missing.
And then secondly is complexity. We’ve talked about that a little bit in the past, but being a global firm, and when you look at just handling global, you have to look at: are the markets supporting everything? Is your depository, your custodian supporting everything?
So it can be issues where the data coming in may be dropping information because it’s not supported, or even something as simple as changing the order of the options adds risk into the process. You also may have different cutoff dates, or there are certain system limitations.
So it really creates a lot of challenges from firms that if you don’t get this right, you know, that’s the risk. But then you also have to look at it from a customer side: where if they’re holding it multiple broker-dealers or custodians, is the customer getting different information as well? And that’s just some of the challenges we have to deal with.
Andrew Delaney, host: Very good, thank you. Yogita, the message seems to be data and complexity underlying it. So what do you see?
Yogita Mehta, SIX: I think in my opinion, the challenge always is... You’re right, I think it’s not that senior management is not conscious of the need to automate, but perhaps the budget becomes an issue. And if we think about it, why does budget become an issue? Because at the end of the day, a financial institution looks at it from: “I need to buy the technology or build the technology.”
So there’s a cost inherent to the technology in itself; there’s also a cost inherent in resources because, whether you’re building or buying, there’s a cost of implementation. All these turn out to be a massive cost of implication.
But then the other complexity that comes in is the project timeline. So say even if the management agreed and decided, “I want to go down the path of automation,” these projects are fairly long-term projects—so they take three to five years. And in three to five years, because the corporate actions world moves a little bit, you have to incorporate the changes that came through along with catching up on the changes that you should have put through earlier on in place.
So at the end of the day, these are some of the practical challenges that the institutions face where they slow down on their journey to automation. But at the same time, if you don’t do it, it’s almost like you’ll have to climb a bigger mountain because you just didn’t start climbing at all. So that’s how I see it.
Andrew Delaney, host: All right, good. Thank you. Jonathan, anything to add there? And maybe we can look at the actual results as well if you can see those.
Jonathan Waldinger, BNY Mellon: So the budget question is very interesting, and I would completely agree that that is always a constraint. If we look at a budget being a finite quantity, right? There’s only so much you can do in a year, or something you can do in two years, three years, five years. And there’s certain things that you have to do—so there’s regulatory changes that come yearly, say the yearly Swift release, that kind of thing. There’s no choice in that; it’s a mandatory spend, it’s a mandatory thing that must be uptaken.
Similarly, there’s market-mandated changes. So a particular market is changing from one process to another process; we have to adapt to it, otherwise maybe we lose what we have currently in terms of STP or processing there anyway.
So what becomes discretionary every year always changes. It could be a certain large number maybe at the beginning of the year and we’re looking at, “Hey, we can automate all of this great stuff, it’s gonna be fantastic.” But you get to mid-year and it’s, “Hey, these four market-mandated changes have been announced; we have to do them by year-end.” So then you have to adjust, you have to shift.
So priorities, I think, are always being sorted, shuffled. And to maintain an ordered list—say one through N, here’s what we want to do—and just focus the dollars where you get the biggest impact, the biggest benefit... to me, that’s what ends up kind of having to happen. But because the fact that the budgets are maybe how they are, that ends up being maybe more difficult than we would like.
Andrew Delaney, host: Absolutely. Thank you very much. Excellent. So, right, let’s move on to the next question here. I’ll stick with you, Jonathan, if I may, and we’ll start to talk about some possible approaches rather than just the pain points. So what do you see as best practice approaches that firms can take to achieve end-to-end or partial automation, and to what extent will this improve operational efficiency?
Jonathan Waldinger, BNY Mellon: So the first step in my mind is always to define the problem. You know, what is it that we’re trying to automate, and what is the scope and the extent to which we are trying to automate something? It can be very easy to say, “Hey, we want to take our instruction process and we want to automate it.” But what does that mean? What’s the input into the instruction and what’s the output from the instruction? Where does it have to go? Is it going to one place, to multiple places? Does it involve onboarding a third-party vendor? Is it something that we can do in-house? Is it something that we have to have a hybrid model of both?
So to me, defining the problem is always the first place to start. And then I think we want to look at what is the methodology we’re going to follow. So if we have a finite period of time in which to do this automation, are we going to have a waterfall project where it’s going to be months of gathering requirements and then a big long technology build and then everything is delivered at once?
Or could it be more agile? So for instance, agile has become a more popular methodology in recent years. Can it be something where there is iterative progress over the course of a year? There are sprints, and maybe every four weeks, every six weeks we’re delivering something and we’re showing incremental progress. By the time we’re done, you get to the same place but maybe it’s an easier, better sort of arrangement with technology, with internal stakeholders. To me, I prefer the agile approach; I think that’s becoming market best practice.
Andrew Delaney, host: So that’s kind of what I would say in terms of that. There’s actually a question in the Slido from an audience member, looking at partial automation. Where’s the best place to start with that in your mind, Jonathan, if that’s an approach people need to take?
Jonathan Waldinger, BNY Mellon: So if only part of a process can be automated, I would point to what is the riskiest part of the process. So if it’s something that there is a human error element that can result in a very large loss or a client dissatisfaction, reputational damage, both... I would try to target that. That isn’t always simple, right? It’s maybe easier said than done. But in my mind, the highest risk and the highest benefit usually go hand in hand. That’s where I would say to start.
Andrew Delaney, host: Good—thank you. Okay, let’s go to Yogita. In your mind, what are the best practice approaches? What’s the right way to do this?
Yogita Mehta, SIX: So I suppose I would look at this from a slightly different lens—more from a solution provider perspective. We think about automation and we instantly think about the whole project and we think about getting a whole new system or something that will do end-to-end processing. But then that may not always be the most feasible option.
So in that case, what could anyone do if they had to go down the partial automation path or not? To me, it’s almost like bringing as much automation or as much less manual input as possible along the journey. So if you have a large operations team to start with, are they organized? Do they have some kind of a workflow tool?
Even something as simple as what we recently released, which is our corporate actions event calendar. All it does is really tell you what are the upcoming corporate action events on your calendar. That’s kind of organizing your team; that’s giving them some tool that will allow them some degree of automation. Not the kind you dream for, but not every time we are going to get there immediately.
On the other hand—I mean, Lawrence just mentioned data again—try and get as qualitative data as possible so that you reduce the errors that are coming in. Choose your data provider carefully and evaluate that they are catering to what you are looking for, where are they sourcing this data from. As a data vendor, we have ways and approaches whereby we say we will source the data from the source itself, which assures us to a large extent that it is quality, reliable, timely data. So that’s another journey to your automation.
Perhaps what I’m emphasizing here is that the automation journey doesn’t have to just make all the way to the end of it. You could look at each chain and look at: “This is a weak chain. This is a repetitive manual effort. Can I bring in some kind of automation, some kind of technology, some tool to give it that part of automation?”
The other part of automation that I find always interesting is: have you considered looking at putting your data into the cloud? And that way what happens is that across the organization you’re getting exactly the same asset rather than each unit taking its own data. So those are some of the areas that one could look at automation in business thoughts.
Andrew Delaney, host: Very good. Well, we’ll come back to that point especially around tools and technologies that people might be using. Before we do that, let’s turn our attention to look a bit beyond operational efficiency. Lawrence, come back to you. Potential business benefits of automation here? What’s more on the business side?
Lawrence Conover, Fidelity Investments: Yeah, so there are probably three points I’m thinking of. One is just going beyond the data, actually our processing. We have shortened settlement coming up—T+1. So that’s happening in May of next year in both the US and Canada, and other parts of the globe as well. So our timeframe for post-trade is cut in half, right? And we’re starting to see a little shortening of event life cycles that’s out there.
So I think putting the right automation in is going to be more critical as trading continues closer to event deadlines and poses additional risks to both the firms and investors, as well as timing and notifications that I’ll talk to.
Two is really risk. So broker-dealers are exposed to both financial and reputational risks should there be an erroneous corporate action announcement process. And regardless of who made the risk, the customer is coming to the broker-dealer, right? So again, we’re the ones standing there.
So I think by having parts of automation—whether it’s partial or full—it’s going to allow us to really focus on the complex events, you know, do the right reconciliation, put the right and sound practices in place for evaluating different data sources to confirm the details and really highlight those exceptions.
And then beyond that, it’s also speed to notification, which I think is more of a competitive advantage. But our customers need to be aware of corporate action events as soon as possible because it’s going to impact their trading strategies. The market is constantly moving, so having the ability to systemically process instructions allows firms to have later cutoff dates. Customers are always pushing us—they want to be able to instruct right at the close of the market.
And then just making sure that data is out there so that they have all the details out there to evaluate that. And then just operationally, on being able to reconcile positions—you know, we have liabilities with counterparties and we need to make sure our payments are correct. Keeping the automation around all those parts helps reduce the risk, but also provides the data and the payments to our customers in the fastest manner.
Andrew Delaney, host: Very good. Thank you. Yogita, you touched on a few points earlier, but really the business benefits as you see them?
Yogita Mehta, SIX: Yeah, I mean, I guess Lawrence here stole a bit of my thunder because the settlement piece was definitely high on my agenda, but he’s covered it so I’m not going to repeat that one. But the other area that I would think about is being able to bring in a certain amount of transparency.
I think corporate actions cannot be fully automated. It’s very important to know what goes wrong, and quite often what goes wrong tends to repeatedly go wrong. So by bringing in a whole lot of automation, not only are you going to minimize the things that are falling apart, but also being able to detect what goes on repeatedly and how can you use technology to fine-tune the challenges that you’re facing.
If there is a particular event that’s in a certain marketplace that is constantly going wrong, you could alter during the automation; you can write rules that will simplify and reduce the amount of manual fields that you could have. So transparency—being able to audit what goes wrong—is critical.
But more importantly, actually, BNY had last year published a document which I had read and I found it very interesting. A lot of operation heads are noticing that they are finding getting good corporate action professionals and retaining that talent far harder and harder.
Andrew Delaney, host: Help us by voting now. This poll is looking at the challenges of automating and modernizing corporate actions processing at your organization. You can click multiple answers. So which of these four factors are on your mind? Is it a lack of management buy-in? Is it a shortfall of budget? Is it a shortage of required skills? Or is it cultural distance to change?
So as I say, you can tick as many boxes as are appropriate to your organization. While you are voting, let’s move on to our next question and I’ll pose this one to Lawrence. What are the challenges of automating and modernizing corporate actions processing as you see them, Lawrence?
Lawrence Conover, Fidelity Investments: Yeah, so I had previously mentioned that ValueExchange survey. Part of that also concluded that on average it actually costs financial services firms more to source the corporate action event than it does to actually process the event on behalf of our customers.
There’s probably a number of factors that are here. I don’t necessarily think it’s firm buy-in. You know, a lack of understanding and risk involved—I think just my experience, I think senior management is aware of the risk. So I’d be curious to see that poll results around that.
First, I think it’s the data, right? So we did talk, you know, I think for the third time now we said there is no golden source out there, but it’s also really a lack of standardization in the process. So when you look at the input of a life cycle, it does require getting all of the information—you know, the timing, the event disruption, the format, the overall content.
And if you’re getting that source, there’s a variety of ways of receiving that, whether it’s ISO 20022, there’s some XBRL formats, there might be some special feeds or even bespoke smart forms—but it’s not a consistent industry model.
So if you’re getting data from multiple sources, you need to be able to pull that together in a manner to compare that, make sure that that is the same data that’s out there. So really trying to bring that into your firm in a standardized format so that you can weigh if it’s accurate, if anything’s missing.
And then secondly is complexity. We’ve talked about that a little bit in the past, but being a global firm, and when you look at just handling global, you have to look at: are the markets supporting everything? Is your depository, your custodian supporting everything?
So it can be issues where the data coming in may be dropping information because it’s not supported, or even something as simple as changing the order of the options adds risk into the process. You also may have different cutoff dates, or there are certain system limitations.
So it really creates a lot of challenges from firms that if you don’t get this right, you know, that’s the risk. But then you also have to look at it from a customer side: where if they’re holding it multiple broker-dealers or custodians, is the customer getting different information as well? And that’s just some of the challenges we have to deal with.
Andrew Delaney, host: Very good, thank you. Yogita, the message seems to be data and complexity underlying it. So what do you see?
Yogita Mehta, SIX: I think in my opinion, the challenge always is... You’re right, I think it’s not that senior management is not conscious of the need to automate, but perhaps the budget becomes an issue. And if we think about it, why does budget become an issue? Because at the end of the day, a financial institution looks at it from: “I need to buy the technology or build the technology.”
So there’s a cost inherent to the technology in itself; there’s also a cost inherent in resources because, whether you’re building or buying, there’s a cost of implementation. All these turn out to be a massive cost of implication.
But then the other complexity that comes in is the project timeline. So say even if the management agreed and decided, “I want to go down the path of automation,” these projects are fairly long-term projects—so they take three to five years. And in three to five years, because the corporate actions world moves a little bit, you have to incorporate the changes that came through along with catching up on the changes that you should have put through earlier on in place.
So at the end of the day, these are some of the practical challenges that the institutions face where they slow down on their journey to automation. But at the same time, if you don’t do it, it’s almost like you’ll have to climb a bigger mountain because you just didn’t start climbing at all. So that’s how I see it.
Andrew Delaney, host: All right, good. Thank you. Jonathan, anything to add there? And maybe we can look at the actual results as well if you can see those.
Jonathan Waldinger, BNY Mellon: So the budget question is very interesting, and I would completely agree that that is always a constraint. If we look at a budget being a finite quantity, right? There’s only so much you can do in a year, or something you can do in two years, three years, five years. And there’s certain things that you have to do—so there’s regulatory changes that come yearly, say the yearly Swift release, that kind of thing. There’s no choice in that; it’s a mandatory spend, it’s a mandatory thing that must be uptaken.
Similarly, there’s market-mandated changes. So a particular market is changing from one process to another process; we have to adapt to it, otherwise maybe we lose what we have currently in terms of STP or processing there anyway.
So what becomes discretionary every year always changes. It could be a certain large number maybe at the beginning of the year and we’re looking at, “Hey, we can automate all of this great stuff, it’s gonna be fantastic.” But you get to mid-year and it’s, “Hey, these four market-mandated changes have been announced; we have to do them by year-end.” So then you have to adjust, you have to shift.
So priorities, I think, are always being sorted, shuffled. And to maintain an ordered list—say one through N, here’s what we want to do—and just focus the dollars where you get the biggest impact, the biggest benefit... to me, that’s what ends up kind of having to happen. But because the fact that the budgets are maybe how they are, that ends up being maybe more difficult than we would like.
Andrew Delaney, host: Absolutely. Thank you very much. Excellent. So, right, let’s move on to the next question here. I’ll stick with you, Jonathan, if I may, and we’ll start to talk about some possible approaches rather than just the pain points. So what do you see as best practice approaches that firms can take to achieve end-to-end or partial automation, and to what extent will this improve operational efficiency?
Jonathan Waldinger, BNY Mellon: So the first step in my mind is always to define the problem. You know, what is it that we’re trying to automate, and what is the scope and the extent to which we are trying to automate something? It can be very easy to say, “Hey, we want to take our instruction process and we want to automate it.” But what does that mean? What’s the input into the instruction and what’s the output from the instruction? Where does it have to go? Is it going to one place, to multiple places? Does it involve onboarding a third-party vendor? Is it something that we can do in-house? Is it something that we have to have a hybrid model of both?
So to me, defining the problem is always the first place to start. And then I think we want to look at what is the methodology we’re going to follow. So if we have a finite period of time in which to do this automation, are we going to have a waterfall project where it’s going to be months of gathering requirements and then a big long technology build and then everything is delivered at once?
Or could it be more agile? So for instance, agile has become a more popular methodology in recent years. Can it be something where there is iterative progress over the course of a year? There are sprints, and maybe every four weeks, every six weeks we’re delivering something and we’re showing incremental progress. By the time we’re done, you get to the same place but maybe it’s an easier, better sort of arrangement with technology, with internal stakeholders. To me, I prefer the agile approach; I think that’s becoming market best practice.
Andrew Delaney, host: So that’s kind of what I would say in terms of that. There’s actually a question in the Slido from an audience member, looking at partial automation. Where’s the best place to start with that in your mind, Jonathan, if that’s an approach people need to take?
Jonathan Waldinger, BNY Mellon: So if only part of a process can be automated, I would point to what is the riskiest part of the process. So if it’s something that there is a human error element that can result in a very large loss or a client dissatisfaction, reputational damage, both... I would try to target that. That isn’t always simple, right? It’s maybe easier said than done. But in my mind, the highest risk and the highest benefit usually go hand in hand. That’s where I would say to start.
Andrew Delaney, host: Good—thank you. Okay, let’s go to Yogita. In your mind, what are the best practice approaches? What’s the right way to do this?
Yogita Mehta, SIX: So I suppose I would look at this from a slightly different lens—more from a solution provider perspective. We think about automation and we instantly think about the whole project and we think about getting a whole new system or something that will do end-to-end processing. But then that may not always be the most feasible option.
So in that case, what could anyone do if they had to go down the partial automation path or not? To me, it’s almost like bringing as much automation or as much less manual input as possible along the journey. So if you have a large operations team to start with, are they organized? Do they have some kind of a workflow tool?
Even something as simple as what we recently released, which is our corporate actions event calendar. All it does is really tell you what are the upcoming corporate action events on your calendar. That’s kind of organizing your team; that’s giving them some tool that will allow them some degree of automation. Not the kind you dream for, but not every time we are going to get there immediately.
On the other hand—I mean, Lawrence just mentioned data again—try and get as qualitative data as possible so that you reduce the errors that are coming in. Choose your data provider carefully and evaluate that they are catering to what you are looking for, where are they sourcing this data from. As a data vendor, we have ways and approaches whereby we say we will source the data from the source itself, which assures us to a large extent that it is quality, reliable, timely data. So that’s another journey to your automation.
Perhaps what I’m emphasizing here is that the automation journey doesn’t have to just make all the way to the end of it. You could look at each chain and look at: “This is a weak chain. This is a repetitive manual effort. Can I bring in some kind of automation, some kind of technology, some tool to give it that part of automation?”
The other part of automation that I find always interesting is: have you considered looking at putting your data into the cloud? And that way what happens is that across the organization you’re getting exactly the same asset rather than each unit taking its own data. So those are some of the areas that one could look at automation in business thoughts.
Andrew Delaney, host: Very good. Well, we’ll come back to that point especially around tools and technologies that people might be using. Before we do that, let’s turn our attention to look a bit beyond operational efficiency. Lawrence, come back to you. Potential business benefits of automation here? What’s more on the business side?
Lawrence Conover, Fidelity Investments: Yeah, so there are probably three points I’m thinking of. One is just going beyond the data, actually our processing. We have shortened settlement coming up—T+1. So that’s happening in May of next year in both the US and Canada, and other parts of the globe as well. So our timeframe for post-trade is cut in half, right? And we’re starting to see a little shortening of event life cycles that’s out there.
So I think putting the right automation in is going to be more critical as trading continues closer to event deadlines and poses additional risks to both the firms and investors, as well as timing and notifications that I’ll talk to.
Two is really risk. So broker-dealers are exposed to both financial and reputational risks should there be an erroneous corporate action announcement process. And regardless of who made the risk, the customer is coming to the broker-dealer, right? So again, we’re the ones standing there.
So I think by having parts of automation—whether it’s partial or full—it’s going to allow us to really focus on the complex events, you know, do the right reconciliation, put the right and sound practices in place for evaluating different data sources to confirm the details and really highlight those exceptions.
And then beyond that, it’s also speed to notification, which I think is more of a competitive advantage. But our customers need to be aware of corporate action events as soon as possible because it’s going to impact their trading strategies. The market is constantly moving, so having the ability to systemically process instructions allows firms to have later cutoff dates. Customers are always pushing us—they want to be able to instruct right at the close of the market.
And then just making sure that data is out there so that they have all the details out there to evaluate that. And then just operationally, on being able to reconcile positions—you know, we have liabilities with counterparties and we need to make sure our payments are correct. Keeping the automation around all those parts helps reduce the risk, but also provides the data and the payments to our customers in the fastest manner.
Andrew Delaney, host: Very good. Thank you. Yogita, you touched on a few points earlier, but really the business benefits as you see them?
Yogita Mehta, SIX: Yeah, I mean, I guess Lawrence here stole a bit of my thunder because the settlement piece was definitely high on my agenda, but he’s covered it so I’m not going to repeat that one. But the other area that I would think about is being able to bring in a certain amount of transparency.
I think corporate actions cannot be fully automated. It’s very important to know what goes wrong, and quite often what goes wrong tends to repeatedly go wrong. So by bringing in a whole lot of automation, not only are you going to minimize the things that are falling apart, but also being able to detect what goes on repeatedly and how can you use technology to fine-tune the challenges that you’re facing.
If there is a particular event that’s in a certain marketplace that is constantly going wrong, you could alter during the automation; you can write rules that will simplify and reduce the amount of manual fields that you could have. So transparency—being able to audit what goes wrong—is critical.
But more importantly, actually, BNY had last year published a document which I had read and I found it very interesting. A lot of operation heads are noticing that they are finding getting good corporate action professionals and retaining that talent far harder and harder.
If team retention or people retention is going to become a bigger and bigger challenge, what one could look at automation as is also a way to retain your team because whenever I speak to corporate action professionals, I always feel that they are the most unsung heroes of the financial industry. They carry a whole lot of risk but they hardly ever get the credit for it. And if you can do anything which is by way of automating and making their day-to-day life easier, that’s pretty much going to go a long way in a space where, you know, corporate action professionals are becoming a scarce commodity. Is that how you feel, Lawrence and Jonathan? Underappreciated?
Jonathan Waldinger, BNY Mellon: Oh well, so not me personally, but I agree that processors are the unsung heroes—is the perfect way to say it. And I think a lot of firms end up with the key person dependency. So you have the one person that’s been on the team for many, many years. You know all the processes, but if that person decides to leave or they, you know, move on or whatever kind of happens, you lose that knowledge base. You lose that subject matter expertise, and then your whole process maybe is kind of shot for a while. So if you’ve automated right and that is no longer the key dependency, you no longer have that risk. That’s an excellent point.
Lawrence Conover, Fidelity Investments: Yeah, there’s a comment I heard that a colleague had shared years ago, and the comment was just basically that, “I am one corporate action event away from being unemployed.” So it’s a matter of making sure you’re getting them right—that one, yeah, for sure.
Andrew Delaney, host: Lovely. Okay. We’ve talked a lot about, you know, how we can improve things, but let’s sort of get a little bit more specific. Come to you, Yogita. What types of technologies, tools, solutions, and services are helpful here? You mentioned cloud as one approach, but what are the things that you see that people should be using?
Yogita Mehta, SIX: I mean, so of course you have the usual suspects like a display terminal to give them more timely market information. You have real-time data feeds or near real-time databases which will make it timely, accurate information that goes into your system. But beyond that, if you look at more modern technologies, you have machine learning which will allow, you know, which could reduce your dependency on plain internet searching.
Like Lawrence was saying, everybody goes to the internet looking for information, but perhaps with machine learning what could fine-tune it... AI is playing a big role, and again AI is playing a big role when it comes to software which are already deployed and you can fine-tune the tolerance levels so that it minimizes the exceptions that the systems are churning out.
Cloud is definitely another area to focus on—be putting your platform in the cloud or putting the data in the cloud. Both of these are definitely areas to focus on. Beyond that, at SIX within the corporate actions team, we are working on things like using bots to make the corporate actions information available much more freely within the financial industry.
And also looking at... well, I’m impressed to see that Microsoft Office or Excel is no longer a popular tool, but I bet there are some organizations out there who are still reliant on it. And see if we can help them getting data directly into Microsoft Office so that if they do not have the budget for full automation, they can achieve partial automation through streaming Excel sheets as well. So these are some of the tools that come to my mind which could be useful.
Andrew Delaney, host: Very good, thank you. Lawrence, same question to you, with the addition of: is this segment ripe for sort of a managed service offering?
Lawrence Conover, Fidelity Investments: Yeah, so I think it was covered very well with the different types that are out there. And I think firm’s appetite is really going to vary depending on their tolerance as well—whether or not they prefer an in-house solution. Right, so we’re a large technology firm, but there’s a lot of service providers out there as well that gather a lot of these details and offer very structured data.
And I think as you start to look at this, I think most firms look to confirm data from multiple sources. So it’s more not just getting the data in, but are you getting that in a standard way or a way you can compare those multiple sources as well? So I think the technologies need to work together, and that needs to be something firms need to pay attention to.
And then, a little twist on this as well is that in today’s environment we’re talking about the manual nature of this. So I think there needs to be a good focus on your staff, which is probably almost equal. So just continuing to make sure you’re building the knowledge and skill sets across the team. And it’s not just data input anymore, right? It’s really: how do you focus on exceptions? Are you providing the right opportunities for your team to actually learn the newer technologies and add benefits?
We’ve talked in the past about the old way of doing things, right? I think a lot of this has been done the same way, but there’s a lot of fresh mindsets that can offer improvement opportunities that are out there. And just trying to pay attention to every little thing that’s coming out today is an advantage.
Andrew Delaney, host: Very good. Absolutely. Good. Okay, well thanks for that. Time is ticking on, so let’s hop over to the Slido. I see there’s a couple of—well, good few—questions come in. But let’s pick a couple before we sort of go sort of close things out.
The first one here goes to anybody on the panel: Should the data vendors provide my firm with account data with corporate actions accounting applied? There’s a little, I guess, a sort of a bit of value-added there. Is that something that people are offering or they should be offering? Yogita, it sounds like something you should look at.
Yogita Mehta, SIX: Well, I mean, it depends on when we say accounting data, what are they referring to? Right. Ideally, as a data vendor, we would like to remain within the market data space, so that what is published and announced as compared to accounting... that’s why we do come by another dataset. So say they’re looking for tax-related information or anything of that sort. So that’s pretty much my take on it, but I would love to hear from Jonathan and Lawrence on what is their thought on this basis.
Lawrence Conover, Fidelity Investments: Yeah, I mean, I’ll just throw out there... I mean, it kind of depends on the firm and their tolerance around it. The one thing to keep in mind, though, is that there’s a lot of regulatory rules around us as well—is that you can certainly outsource a function, but you can’t outsource the responsibility. So if you’re struggling in-house to build that account calculation and you use a service provider, that’s certainly an opportunity. But you just need to—you need a way to evaluate that and make sure that the information is right coming back. So I just think it’s more of an option for firms out there if they want to use that. You know, they just need to make sure they have the right practices in place.
Andrew Delaney, host: Jonathan, any thoughts?
Jonathan Waldinger, BNY Mellon: Yeah, I would agree. So I think that if we’re talking about a third-party data provider, I think that’s kind of the lane that that provider would be in, right? It’s more informational; it’s bringing in, say, vendor feeds and such. If we’re talking about a third-party accounting solution, that is a way that one can go, but I would suggest to follow the proper governance around that. Right, there’s a lot of regulation, like Lawrence had mentioned, in terms of where that information is going, information security, separation of legal entities, that type of thing. Um, it would be a pretty complex undertaking in my view to kind of bring in a provider maybe to manage that, but not impossible—maybe just something to kind of be mindful of.
Andrew Delaney, host: Very good. Thank you. Let’s say there’s another question here: We are a fairly small organization. Are there still benefits in automation or is manual processing still okay? Thoughts on that question?
Jonathan Waldinger, BNY Mellon: So I think that there’s always benefits, right? Large or small, there is some element, say, of human error that can always kind of creep in. Even if it’s one person does all the processing. It might not be, say, a massive headcount reduction that results in a bunch of savings for that year, but you’re still going to reduce some risk and you’re still going to make the process better. And perhaps you then kind of repurpose the few folks who are doing the processing to something that’s a little more value-add kind of at the end of the day. So I would say no matter the size of the firm, there’s always benefits.
Andrew Delaney, host: Okay, any other thoughts on that?
Lawrence Conover, Fidelity Investments: Yeah, I’m going to kind of agree with that, right? So it’s a matter of: can you focus your staff on looking at the right things, as opposed to just entering data or reading something? So I think even a little bit of automation is going to go a long way to make sure you’re managing risk.
Andrew Delaney, host: Very good. Final audience question, then we’ll get back to the script. Outcome: Data scrubbing is still a topic in a mature market such as corporate actions data that would make a thought make everyone smile. Anyone want to take a shot of that?
Yogita Mehta, SIX: Uh, well I’ll give it a first stab and then I’d love to hear from my co-panelists here. But I mean, the data scrubbing kind of remains a requirement because there is no standardization on how this data is published from the issuer itself. If we standardize the process of how the data should be published... Like Lawrence put it, it’s a 100-page document. The question is that: are we not ready to standardize that hundred-page document? Are we not in a position to automate that 100-page document?
As a data vendor, we source all our data from exchanges and CSDs—or most of our data from exchanges and CSDs—and you’d be amazed how much of things do not match up. How many times they interpret the event differently, they present the data differently. And I suppose that’s a good thing because that’s why vendors such as us have a role to play in the marketplace. But yet it’s still as a team, as corporate action professionals, could we just not resolve the problem right at the grassroots level and then move forward? But that still doesn’t happen. But that’s my take on it. Jonathan, Lawrence—over to you.
Jonathan Waldinger, BNY Mellon: Yeah, I would totally agree. So I think Lawrence said this perfectly kind of at the open: there is no golden source, there is no golden copy. So no matter how mature a market may be, it still must... the data still must be scrubbed because we need to know that it’s right. We need to know that it’s applicable to all markets; maybe it’s inapplicable to a few. That whole situation. So because of that element of kind of the unknown, it always has to be scrubbed. Maybe it’s less scrubbing than it was 15 years ago or however that kind of works, but there still is some amount that must be performed.
Lawrence Conover, Fidelity Investments: Yeah, and I’m just going to say that I think a key here is going to be regulation. So, you know, we hate to talk about that sometimes, right, with regulation, but that’s part of it—is there’s no requirement today to put this into a standardized format. So it’s kind of interesting when you look out in the US: the SEC requires issuers today to file all kinds of information about the health of their company, their financial status, and they’ve moved more and more over to standardized formatting into Edgar. So they’re just not submitting a paper document; they have to upload data.
Yeah, corporate action data is not part of that. If you actually look at Australia, so a couple years ago the Australian market did move to automation and standardization—a little different model. You know, if you trade in Australia, you need to actually be listed on their exchange, and part of their listing requirement is to get this data. So they’ve now required issuers to publish this data on a file, and the market actually disseminates that today. So they’ve created standardization.
I believe they started with dividends and interest payments—simple—and they’ve moved on to complex corporate actions. But I think surprisingly the issuers backed this as well and it was a big benefit to the firms and the customers that trade the market. So again, it’s an example of it actually working if there’s a requirement out there that has to be published in a certain way.
Andrew Delaney, host: Very good, thank you. Well, let’s go... with sort of running out of time now, so let’s sort of start to wrap things up a little bit. We’ve touched on this, but maybe we can between us summarize a little bit. Start with you, Lawrence, and then we’ll go to Jonathan. What are the key benefits of getting this right and the penalties of getting it wrong? How would you sum those up?
Lawrence Conover, Fidelity Investments: Yeah, so it’s kind of the financial and reputational risk I mentioned in the past. So this is a little old, but back in 2010 there was a survey conducted by DTCC and Swift that estimated that there was probably a $400 million reduction in operating costs to firms in implementing some sort of a standardization or automation in corporate actions. The focus at the time was on XBRL—that was over a decade ago. I’m sure that number is probably quadrupled at this point. So there is risk, there is effort there. And then just from a reputational standard, right? So the last thing a firm wants to be is in the Wall Street Journal highlighting they had a big operational issue. So that’s where a lot of the focus is—making sure we’re doing things right to protect our firm, protect our customers as well.
Jonathan Waldinger, BNY Mellon: Sure. So I’ll take sort of the penalties for getting it wrong. So if you’re a firm and you decide to automate a process and you then take your head count and you haven’t automated it properly or something has kind of gone wrong, you now no longer have the folks to do the processing that you had prior, and so you’re at a kind of a double disadvantage. So that’s one, in my mind, one of the main reasons to ensure this is totally different, right? Is that you’re going to take a head count at some point, so you need to ensure that when you do, it’s valid how you’ve measured and assessed how many folks can kind of be part of that head count, how it all sort of works out. It’s done properly. Otherwise you will leave yourself short-handed, which puts even more risk on the process, which is the exact opposite of kind of the original intent.
Andrew Delaney, host: Very good. Excellent. Yogita, anything to add to this one?
Yogita Mehta, SIX: Nope, I think my co-panelists here have actually calculated everything.
Andrew Delaney, host: Very good. Okay, so final question then, sort of an open-ended one. Start and we’ll come back to you, Jonathan, for this: Advice for practitioners on addressing automation in corporate actions processing. What would be your sort of main advice?
Jonathan Waldinger, BNY Mellon: Sure. So the main advice that I will give is advice that I was once given by a mentor of mine—I think advice that she was once given by a mentor of hers—is if you’re looking to automate something, you need to build your business case. And if it doesn’t fit into the budget this year, build a better business case and get it into the budget next year.
Measuring the problem, measuring the time a particular thing takes, making sure that you understand all the risks and the scope and what’s all kind of included—that all needs to be very well enumerated in a business case. Otherwise it will not be prioritized, it will not be taken up, you’ll never get funds allocated for it. So to me, building that business case, making sure that it’s airtight and it’s locked down and it’s proper calculations and so forth, will enable you eventually to get that sort of item in, get it in the priorities list, get above the line, and then hopefully get it successfully implemented.
Andrew Delaney, host: Very good—that’s great advice. Lawrence, what would be your advice?
Lawrence Conover, Fidelity Investments: Yes, so probably three things I was thinking of. One is: identify your risk. So that’s really evaluating your data sources on a regular basis, your own systems technologies, your custodian practices, and your own procedures. Right, so if you’re doing this on a regular basis, you really have a chance to understand where your weaknesses, your gaps, and your areas of high risks are. So I think knowing what that is allows for better focus if you’re looking at an area to automate.
Second, I’ll say explore newer technologies. Right, so I think technologies are constantly evolving—I think it’s quicker than six months now, this is what the average is. You know, there’s been a lot of great success with machine learning and bots that have added value in this space. And you have the hot buzzword now—let’s chat ChatGPT or those types of technologies. I think there’s some regulatory concerns there, but I think everyone’s still learning what the powers are of that type of technology out there, and that’s just going to continue to go.
And then just the third point I mentioned in the past is focus on your staff, and making sure that we’re continuing to build the skills and experience behind it and listen to creative opportunities.
Andrew Delaney, host: Very good, thank you very much. And finally, Yogita, what would be your advice?
Yogita Mehta, SIX: Yeah, I think... I mean first things first, if you are going on this journey, I’ve always believed that 100% STP is never going to be achievable. So if your expectations are too high, let’s start with the fact that you will never achieve 100% STP in the corporate actions processing space. Once you’ve done that, and like Lawrence said, you identify all your risk. As Jonathan put it, build your business case.
And then the last piece that I would like to add from a solution provider perspective is that don’t sit there and think that you can’t achieve it. So you build your case and you’ve got limited budget—go out there, look for other technological solutions. There is always room for improving your processes in bits, in small parts. Don’t just say that, “Oh gosh, I didn’t get the full budget so I can’t do anything.” Like Lawrence put it, the technology is evolving so fast sometimes we don’t even know what is available out there. So the better option is to open up your mind, attend webinars—that is what you’re attending right now—and that’ll give you all the different options and all the different ideas that you could go about in the limited budget that you may have been sanctioned.
Andrew Delaney, host: Fabulous. Thank you, Yogita. And thanks to Lawrence and Jonathan today for sharing their expertise. We really appreciate your generosity, as I’m sure the audience does. And if you could hear them, they’d be listening to a rapturous round of applause at this moment. Unfortunately, you’ve just got me. But yeah, thank you to the panelists and thanks to our sponsor SIX who make webinars like this possible.
Just a few pointers before we leave you today. First of all, there are a few links on your screen where you can find out more about SIX products, so please would encourage you to click on those and continue your education in this segment. See what’s on offer there—so please do that.
A couple of A-Team Group things that may be of interest to you: We are running our Data Management Summit in New York, September 28th at a venue called Ease on Third Avenue in Midtown. I will be hosting, so I’d love to see some of you there. Come and say hi. And as I say, that is September 28th. I’m guessing you can use the QR code on your screen to register, so I would encourage you to do that—so please sign up for that.
3rd of October, we are hosting a webinar on how to leverage data lineage for actionable business insights, so we’d encourage you to look at our website and sign up for that. And on 11th of October, we have a webinar on best practice approaches to integrating legacy data with the cloud. So again, all details on our website—I would love you to attend.
Okay, so I think we’re wrapping things up. One more thank you to Yogita, Lawrence, and Jonathan. And again, we really appreciate you sharing your expertise. We would invite delegates to complete our feedback form, which again you should be able to look at through your screen. We’re always keen to hear your views, help improve our webinars, panels, and other events so we can bring you more interesting and informative information. So on that note, I will say thanks one more time and goodbye. Thanks to our panelists and we’ll see you again soon.
Thank you very much. Bye-bye.