3 Steps to Deliver a More Intelligent Scanning System for Managing Corporate Announcements

Asset managers, just like brokers, need to have an in-depth understanding of their portfolios at all times to fully optimize rates of return for their customers and firms.

To avoid missing pertinent information, middle-office managers must closely monitor and repeatedly reinterpret corporate announcements that are regularly published in issuer documents. Reading through all of that information from relevant sources can be time-consuming and costly without the right tools and approach.

An organization’s performance hinges on the ability to make the best decisions in line with each issuer’s situation, so information is plainly critical. For example, early warning systems that alert traders to sensitive events can result in decisions that will have a direct impact on a transaction’s profitability and risk.

By implementing a solution to intelligently scan corporate announcements, you can rapidly provide your traders with the personalized information they need when they most need it. And it allows you to constitute a trusted single source for creating other value-added services for your customers.

Here are three steps you can take to build the data platform needed for developing a more effective solution.

#1 – Create a market scan repository for managing corporate announcement information

Your portfolios are connected to multiple sources of information, and middle-office analysts have to process dozens of weekly announcements to monitor business activity and specialized threads – such as Reuters.

Manually keeping up with this information every day is a major task, and the proliferation of PDF-formatted reports has made integrating the data an even bigger challenge.

With digitalization also comes the possibility of reorganizing how you wish to process your market information, and shortening exchanges between the middle-office analysts and front-office traders.

Integrating and classifying all announcements and documents useful for understanding the latest issuer events serves to constitute a veritable market scan repository, shared by analysts and traders.

By accommodating all source document formats, you will have a single trusted source and workspace for announcements, directly accessible for any analysis, and without the need for any development.

You will thus be able to compile all disparate documents in a single, reliable, and up-to-date source, allowing you to make the best decisions immediately. And, you can – at all times – access the reports in which your traders are interested, and search for past information useful for regulatory authorities.

#2 – Automatically identify sensitive information

The specific processing of announcements often requires the mobilization of several middle-office people who have to read reports with tens or even hundreds of pages, identify pertinent information, and share it with traders, risk management, and compliance. Even if tedious, these tasks require an expert eye and cannot be entrusted to unqualified staff.

Establishing a market scan repository provides an opportunity to automate searching for the information you need.

In fact, based on a dictionary of keywords or specific expressions, an intelligent, full text search engine is possible for users to discover the most relevant information. An application built on this type of engine provides faster access and enables the automation of customized documentation and report production.

The processing capacity of such a system can substantially reduce the time required to consume announcements as well as all documents and information stored in your market scan repository.

With this type of system, your analysts can quickly provide your traders with sensitive information and easily respond to any search without the need for additional IT support. This leaves you free to assign your experts to higher value-added analytical tasks.

#3 – Create alerts per trader

To optimize decision-making, each trader closely follows a customer portfolio and must be informed as swiftly as possible about any related sensitive matters that may require actions to be taken.

Implementing automatic alerts makes it easier to inform your traders. Alerts can be scheduled depending on the nature and sensitivity of the information. For example, immediate alerts for important time-sensitive information and daily or weekly alerts for informational summaries.

By integrating automatic analysis processes with data about your traders’ customers and their interests, you can automatically establish personalized information reports for each recipient.

In addition, by defining different user profiles, you can utilize the information in your market scan repository for all your needs: not only alerting traders, but also drawing up summaries for your managers and/or the regulator.

Obviously, consideration must be given to security to make sure that your information is circulating in complete confidentiality, in line with each recipient’s profile.

Find Out More

If you would like to hear how we’ve helped other financial firms deliver against requirements for multi-structured data integration to solve this specific use case and others like it, please email Jennyfer.Cresta@MarkLogic.com.