Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing (HKEX) has launched a corporate action message standardisation (CAMS) service.
The new service provides an additional channel for market participants to receive information on corporate actions, such as cash dividend and meeting notifications, in the form of ISO 20022 messages via SWIFT.
In today’s Hong Kong cash market, listed issuers disseminate corporate action event information in an unstructured PDF format that is published through the HKEX news website.
Market participants, financial intermediaries, and investors largely interpret this bulk of unstructured and non-standardised information manually, explains HKEX.
According to HKEX, such processes naturally result in significant and unnecessary delays, risks and costs.
CAMS will facilitate market participants in achieving straight through processing (STP) when handling corporate actions event information in the Hong Kong cash market.
This solution aims to standardise and streamline the existing processes and maximise efficiencies for market participants.
ISO 20022 is a multi-part international standard for a common platform for the development of messages. It will impact all financial institutions active in cross-border payments as well as market infrastructures and third-party vendors.
Organisations will have to think about and consider how they will manage, disseminate and store the richness of data provided by the new functionalities enabled by ISO 20022.
Last week, panellists at the Sibos conference discussed ISO 20022. UBS’ Vicky Kyproglou observed that the payments side of the industry has been working for a while towards a set deadline in the migration towards ISO 20022. However, the pace of change is slower in the securities space.
