With a more relaxed US regulatory climate, tax reform and growing cash reserves more public companies are building strategic growth through mergers and acquisitions. This year alone we witnessed the $88.8 billion merger of Bristol-Myers Squibb/Celgene, $41 billion acquisition of Worldpay by FIS, and Fiserv/First Data combining forces in a $38.2 billion deal. On top of this, in 2018 share buybacks from companies in the S&P 500 hit a record at $806.4 billion. All this governance results in a material change to company’s public equity and debt by the issuance of corporate actions and require shareholders attention and participation.

In my upcoming report, Unsung No More: The New World of Corporate Actions - Avoiding Errors While Generating Alpha, I provide an overview of corporate action operational risk and how leveraging technology can help firms generate returns from corporate actions and associated data surrounding them. The right tools and operational infrastructure can allow advisors to optimise individual events and analyse data to build investment insights through scrip dividend arbitration and trade idea generation.

To realize the opportunities offered by corporate actions, Wealth managers need a robust system of interconnected expertise, with operations functions that are automated, performed manually by humans or in combination. Artificial intelligence and blockchain technologies can also enable firms to systematically reduce risk and improve efficiencies in operations. Ultimately, those firms that connect corporate action operations to the entire suite of investment operations will achieve the operational transparency that allows them to adapt to client and regulatory needs.