The Price of Trust: A Point of View on Market Events

Who Pays for the Golden Record

Paper available to download here

Introduction

Every day, issuers and the agents acting on their behalf publish notices describing financial market events such as shareholder meetings, corporate actions and disclosure requests.

Once published, those notices are interpreted, normalised and converted into operational data. Across the investment chain, multiple organisations compare sources, resolve differences and apply their own validation until each is sufficiently confident that its version captures the issuer’s business intent and can be trusted.

The inefficiency of this operating model has been recognised for decades. The industry repeatedly returns to the value of better information at source. The challenge has been establishing an operating model that delivers trust from the outset and a commercial model through which that value can be realised and shared among those who create and benefit from it.

The Last Interpretation proposed converting the business meaning of an issuer’s final announcement - whether a written notice, prospectus or other document - into a Structured Business Event before publication. The issuer or its authorised agent would review and validate that structured event before approving its release. The resulting Golden Record would carry the authority of the organisation responsible for the event.

In this model, the first trusted interpretation becomes the last. Downstream organisations retain their own controls and processing responsibilities but gain an authoritative statement of the issuer’s intention against which to perform them.

This paper examines the commercial arrangements that could make that change possible.

Throughout this paper, “issuer agents” include registrars, transfer agents and other agents appointed to act on an issuer’s behalf. “Issuing party” means the issuer itself or an issuer agent authorised and accountable for validating that the Structured Business Event represents the issuer’s business intent.

Creating, validating and governing a Structured Business Event has a cost. It may also create direct benefits for the issuer and its agent. Much of the wider financial benefit, however, would arise among the organisations that currently capture, interpret, compare and reconcile information after publication.

A viable commercial model must connect those savings with the work that makes them possible.

The proposition explored here is straightforward. Downstream beneficiaries fund the capability, either directly or through the data vendors and market infrastructures that serve them. The issuing party receives a commercial return for creating, validating and governing authoritative events. An issuer providing the service directly receives that revenue itself. Where an issuer agent provides the service, it shares part of the return with its issuer clients through lower fees.

The issuer is therefore asked to support and validate a better operating model from which it receives a direct economic benefit, without an additional charge for the service.

Published research and industry initiatives from ValueExchange, DTCC, S&P Global, SWIFT and Chainlink illustrate the scale of processing costs, duplicated effort and potential savings. If those findings are broadly sound, directing even a portion of the value currently consumed by repeated interpretation towards validation at source could support a substantial commercial opportunity.

The illustrations in this paper explore what that could make possible. They distinguish the published research from the paper’s assumptions about the share of savings attributable to the proposed model, the price of the service and how its proceeds could be distributed.

Measurement would help participants agree pricing and their respective shares of the value. The central proposition is the mechanism through which they could realise that value: funding authority at source from the expenditure it helps them avoid downstream.

The Last Interpretation described how the market could establish trust at source.

The Price of Trust asks who should pay for it - and how those who create the value should share in it.

1. An Unanswered Question

Who benefits from the work issuers are being asked to do?

Some years ago, during one of the market’s periodic attempts to persuade issuers and their agents to produce more structured corporate-action information, a registrar stated a brutal truth:

“You want us to do more, for your benefit - and do so at our cost.”

The objection challenged a fundamental assumption: that because the information originates with the issuer, the cost of improving it for downstream use must also belong to the issuer.

The issuing party already reviews and approves the announcement through which it communicates the event. The Last Interpretation proposed extending that approval to the Structured Business Event, confirming before publication that its business meaning accurately represents the intended outcome.

That confirmation establishes authority at source and allows downstream organisations to avoid repeatedly reconstructing the issuer’s intention. The commercial question is how those beneficiaries should contribute to the service that makes this possible.

Recent industry discussions suggest that the starting assumption has changed little. When issuer participation is raised, the conversation still turns quickly to carrots and sticks. Benefits often cited include better issuer-investor relationships, more timely communication and more efficient handling of elections and votes. Alongside them come suggestions of regulatory obligations, listing requirements and CSD-led initiatives. Yet the question remains how to persuade - or require - the issuer to act, with the cost still expected to sit at source.

These questions concern how to secure participation. They leave the underlying allocation of cost unresolved.

The growing attention given to registrars, transfer agents and other issuer agents creates a practical opportunity. These organisations already serve substantial populations of issuers and could provide a route to preparing and validating Structured Business Events at scale.

But identifying who could perform the work does not establish who should fund it. If the agent simply adds the cost to its issuer’s bill, the answer to the registrar is still: yes, you are expected to pay for improvements from which others benefit.

The market therefore continues to ask:

How do we incentivise issuers?

Those benefits to issuer-investor relationships, communication and event handling are worthwhile. Yet the recurring debate about issuer participation suggests that they have not, on their own, provided a sufficiently compelling reason to change.

A direct financial incentive takes the discussion further but raises additional questions. Who would provide the payment? What service would it purchase? How would its value be determined, and from whose savings would it be funded?

Issuers and their agents may of course gain from better processes at source, and those benefits belong in the commercial model. But so do the savings available to organisations that would otherwise capture, interpret, compare and reconcile the announcement after publication.

The value of reducing that duplication has long been recognised. What has been missing is a workable arrangement connecting the organisations that would save with those whose work makes the saving possible.

The issuing party performs the validation at source. The registrar’s challenge therefore leads to two commercial questions:

• Who benefits from the work performed by the issuing party?

• How should the resulting value be shared between those beneficiaries and the issuing party?

To answer those questions, we need to follow an announcement after publication and examine the work the market performs to establish confidence in the issuer’s intention.

What is the market already paying to interpret the same event repeatedly?

2. The Cost of Repeated Interpretation

What is the market already paying to interpret the same event repeatedly?

The operating model proposed in The Last Interpretation establishes the issuer’s intended business outcome before publication. The final announcement is converted into a Structured Business Event, reviewed and approved by the issuing party. That approved event becomes the Golden Record issued at source.

In the prevailing model, the announcement enters the market before that authoritative structured representation has been established. Recipients interpret and normalise it into operational data. Other organisations compare it with separate sources, resolve differences, enrich it for their services and apply their own validation.

Each organisation has legitimate controls to perform. It remains responsible for the information it uses and passes on. But those controls operate alongside repeated attempts to establish what the issuer intended.

The result is multiple Golden Interpretations. Each may be well controlled and internally trusted, but none acquires the issuing party’s authority merely by surviving another round of comparison, enrichment or validation.

In 2021, S&P Global reported that producing an issuer golden “record” can consume between 40% and 60% of a corporate-actions operations team’s time, depending on event volume and complexity[1]. Its 2026 analysis identifies an authoritative corporate-actions data core as a major accelerator of return on investment because of the duplicated effort it could remove from downstream systems[2].

The diagnosis is persuasive. The label is less so. A record assembled and validated downstream may be an excellent Golden Interpretation. It does not become the issuer’s Golden Record unless the issuing party has validated it.

The economic significance is that multiple organisations incur the cost of establishing their own trusted version independently.

SWIFT’s 2023 Fighting Friction in Corporate Actions illustrates the scale of that duplication. Its network analysis found that an asset manager can receive notifications about one corporate action from more than 100 sources. SWIFT described those messages as “almost always different or contradictory”, sometimes on critical details such as event options and deadlines[3].

Some variation is legitimate. Intermediaries may apply different client deadlines, service levels or processing requirements. The issuer’s underlying terms, however, should not change as the event passes through the chain. Whether every difference is truly contradictory is less important than the operating reality: many organisations are separately interpreting, checking and redistributing the same underlying event.

That same SWIFT report described a pilot involving six custodians and asset managers, including American Century Investments, Citi and Northern Trust. Using Symbiont’s distributed-ledger platform, the participants brought together separate MT564 notifications for the same event, compared their fields, identified inconsistencies and created what SWIFT called a “proposed shared copy” from information supplied by multiple sources.

The pilot demonstrated how technology could improve comparison, preserve message provenance and provide a common version around which participants could reconcile. But that shared copy was assembled from interpretations that had already entered the market.

More recent initiatives apply artificial intelligence, distributed ledgers and consensus mechanisms to the same problem. Chainlink, working with institutions including SWIFT, DTCC and Euroclear, has demonstrated how multiple artificial-intelligence models can extract and interpret corporate-action information and reach consensus on a unified record[4].

These approaches may produce more complete, consistent and accurate data. They may also infer the issuer’s intention correctly. But their outputs do not carry the authority - and therefore the basis for trust - that comes from a Structured Business Event validated by the issuing party.

This raises a practical question about where the technology is applied. If AI can extract and structure the business meaning of an announcement after publication, as is claimed, would it not make sense to use it at the start of the process, in preparing the Structured Business Event before publication?

The issuing party could then review and approve that business meaning before the event enters the market.

The economic consequence is that downstream organisations would receive a confirmed statement of the intended outcome. The work of independently reconstructing that outcome, comparing competing interpretations and resolving the differences between them would no longer need to be repeated for each recipient to establish its own version.

The market already recognises the value of removing that duplication. Establishing authority at source provides the operating basis for doing so. The commercial opportunity is to use part of the expenditure avoided downstream to fund the service that makes it possible.

What could the market save if it no longer had to create, compare and reconcile those interpretations independently?

3. The Size of the Prize

Where are the potential savings created?

ValueExchange research produced with DTCC puts the annual cost of corporate-actions processing for US securities at approximately USD58 billion. It identifies a potential USD15 billion saving through improvements including real-time, standardised data and better coordination across the investment chain[5].

If those estimates are broadly sound, they indicate a substantial pool of expenditure from which a service providing issuer-validated events could be funded. The opportunity to reduce that expenditure has long been recognised. The proposed model provides a way to realise and share the resulting value.

Issuer validation would not capture the entire USD15 billion. The research concerns a wider transformation of corporate-actions processing, including activities that continue after the event’s terms have been established. Participants would still need to make decisions, submit instructions, calculate entitlements and process payments, with the appropriate controls.

But the event’s intended business meaning underpins all of that work. Where organisations must independently capture, interpret, compare and reconcile that meaning, they incur costs before they can confidently perform the processes for which they are responsible.

Establishing the Golden Record at source targets that repeated effort. It also creates the potential to reduce the exceptions, corrections and delays caused when different interpretations enter downstream workflows.

The research does not isolate the share of savings attributable to issuer validation. The following illustrations take its USD15 billion estimate as their starting point and show what different assumed shares would represent.

These are illustrative T-Scape scenarios, not findings of ValueExchange or DTCC. The percentages are assumptions, not estimates of the saving issuer validation would deliver.

If removing repeated interpretation and its consequences accounted for one tenth of the identified opportunity, it would represent USD1.5 billion annually for US securities alone.

That is a potential saving against which the cost of creating, validating and distributing authoritative events could be assessed. The commercial model would need to leave sufficient value with downstream participants after their contributions and implementation costs, while funding the service at source and providing a return to those responsible for it.

The opportunity also extends beyond the scope of the US research. Europe’s multiple CSDs, languages and market practices create further settings in which to examine the cost of repeated interpretation. Those differences may or may not establish a larger saving, but they do make the same economic question relevant across other markets.

Nor is the proposed operating model confined to corporate actions. Other financial market events begin with an announcement or document whose business meaning must be established before organisations can act. The extent of duplicated work and the economics of removing it would need to be assessed within each ecosystem.

These illustrations show what could be achieved if even a fraction of the published savings opportunity were realised through issuer validation. The precise share will vary, but the commercial principle remains that part of the expenditure avoided downstream can fund the service at source while leaving beneficiaries with a net saving.

The question is how to connect those beneficiaries with the issuing parties whose validation makes that saving possible.

If the savings arise downstream, why should the cost remain upstream?

4. The Wrong Party Gets the Bill

Why should the cost remain upstream when the benefit arises downstream?

The issuing party may gain from better processes at source. An issuer agent could improve its own operations and offer a more valuable service. But much of the wider benefit arises among the organisations that would otherwise interpret, compare and reconcile separate versions of the same event.

The registrar’s objection was about who pays for that benefit. If the issuer funds the service while downstream organisations retain the savings, the commercial answer remains the same: the issuer is paying for improvements enjoyed elsewhere in the investment chain.

Recent panel discussions at POSTTRADE 360° illustrated how firmly that assumption remains embedded.

One discussion recognised the importance of issuer agents, including transfer agents, which already serve large populations of issuers. Their position makes them credible participants in the operating model proposed here: they could prepare and govern Structured Business Events on behalf of those issuers.

Yet one panellist’s natural assumption was that the issuer would pay its agent to produce the better information.

The agent is well placed to perform the work. But passing its charge back to the issuer leaves the funding assumption unchanged. The discussion had identified who could deliver better information without connecting the cost of doing so to those who would save money by receiving it.

The way industry evidence is interpreted provides a revealing example.

ValueExchange identifies up to 36 interactions at issuer level before a corporate event reaches investors. Those interactions may span multiple departments, agents and advisers involved in creating, reviewing and approving the event[6].

During a POSTTRADE 360° discussion, that figure was described as 36 people touching the event and used to support an argument that efficiencies at source could allow the issuer to fund the change.

But a count of interactions does not establish a headcount, still less a removable cost.

Many of those interactions concern the legal, financial, governance and approval work through which the event itself comes into existence. Publishing the final outcome as a Structured Business Event does not remove the need to reach and approve that outcome.

There may be opportunities to improve those processes. The figure alone does not quantify them.

The irony is difficult to miss. A measure of interactions became a count of people, and that count became the basis for a proposed saving to justify asking the issuer to pay.

The research had acquired another interpretation as it passed through the market.

ValueExchange makes a further point with greater relevance to the proposed funding model: a typical corporate event can generate more than 110,000 interactions across financial institutions.

Those interactions are not all avoidable either. They do, however, show how work multiplies after the event leaves the issuer. Within that activity lies the repeated capture, interpretation, comparison and reconciliation that issuer validation is intended to reduce.

The economic case should follow the work that can actually be avoided and identify the organisations that would otherwise pay to perform it.

Other contributions to the discussions showed why improved source information must be judged by what changes downstream.

Australia and Singapore were cited as markets where the problem had already been addressed. That prompted a challenge from another participant: their team was still scrubbing Australian corporate-action information.

The exchange does not establish the effectiveness of either market’s arrangements. It does expose the weakness in treating improved submission requirements as proof that the underlying problem has been solved. Structured announcements, templates and listing conditions may improve the information entering the market. The practical test is whether recipients can rely on the event as validated by the issuing party and avoid recreating its meaning independently.

The same question applies when responsibility is assigned to CSDs or a proposed industry utility.

A CSD or utility could organise participation, provide distribution and establish common service arrangements. But choosing an institution to coordinate the work does not, by itself, establish issuer authority or explain how the service should be funded.

Nor does coordination require every issuer and intermediary to participate before value can be realised. An issuer agent and its downstream customers could adopt the model for a defined population of events while other events continue through existing arrangements.

One panellist also suggested that custodians could be willing to pay for better information from source.

That was an individual contribution, not a purchasing commitment or evidence of demand across the custody industry. Its significance was that it opened a different commercial possibility: an organisation benefiting downstream might fund the capability at source.

The commercial proposition extends beyond that individual expression of interest. It connects expenditure already incurred downstream with a service that would remove the need for repeated interpretation, allowing beneficiaries to fund its provision and retain part of the saving.

Simply transferring expenditure from issuers to custodians would achieve little if the existing duplication continued. The model must reduce the total cost of establishing and using trusted event information, leaving sufficient value to reward those who create it and those who pay for it.

The familiar alternatives leave this funding question unresolved:

• Leaving each intermediary to solve the problem independently preserves repeated interpretation and validation.

• Asking a data vendor to absorb the cost still requires a commercial return, particularly where the proposed change affects existing interpretation and validation services.

• Establishing a central utility requires decisions about ownership, liability, governance, coverage and funding. Those decisions need not all be settled globally before participating organisations establish a commercial service.

• Regulation or listing conditions could mandate structured information but would not themselves establish how the cost should be shared or ensure that the resulting business event carries accountable issuer validation.

The industry has created a large market for repairing ambiguity. The opportunity is to make preventing that ambiguity commercially worthwhile for those at source.

What if those who save money downstream paid those who create the saving at source?

5. A Market for Trusted Source Data

Allowing value to flow back to the source.

A viable commercial model begins with the organisations that benefit. Those avoiding repeated capture, interpretation, comparison and reconciliation pay for access to issuer-validated Structured Business Events. Their payments fund the work at source, while leaving them with a net saving. The issuer pays no additional charge for this service.

The issuing party receives revenue for preparing, validating and governing the Structured Business Event throughout the lifetime of each event. 

That revenue funds the technology, people and controls required to deliver the service and provides a commercial return to the issuing party. Where the issuer provides the service directly, it retains that return. Where an issuer agent provides it, the revenue also allows part of the value to be shared with issuer clients through lower fees.

The benefit therefore reaches the issuer in either arrangement: directly through service revenue or through reduced agent fees. An issuer agent gains a source of revenue that can fund a better service and strengthen its relationships with issuers.

The downstream customer also has a straightforward reason to participate: the service must cost less than the work and risk it helps that customer avoid.

The issuer-agent arrangement offers a practical route to scale because one provider can serve an existing population of issuers. The following discussion develops that arrangement.

Payments need not be collected separately from every organisation that ultimately uses an event. Data vendors, custodians and market infrastructures already bring together demand and distribute information. They could license populations of issuer-validated events and incorporate them into the services they provide.

An issuer agent would therefore not need to identify every investor holding every affected security. It could contract with a smaller number of distributors or substantial users, with pricing reflecting the coverage and value of the service supplied.

For example, a data vendor could license the events produced by an issuer agent across its issuer population. The vendor would obtain authoritative source information, reduce the work required to establish the underlying event terms and continue supplying its customers with distribution, enrichment and other services. Part of its commercial payment would flow back to the agent responsible for the validated events.

Custodians or investment managers could also buy directly where that suited their operating arrangements. The appropriate route would depend on how customers obtain information and where the avoidable costs sit.

This model gives existing intermediaries a commercial role in delivering the change. Their relationships, coverage and distribution capabilities remain valuable. Their opportunity is to build services around an authoritative event whose underlying meaning has already been confirmed.

Nor does the model require one global platform or a single distribution network. Competing services could distribute the same issuer-validated event, provided its meaning, provenance and approval status are preserved.

The Structured Business Event can also be rendered into the formats recipients require, subject to the capabilities of those formats. Establishing authority at source need not wait for every recipient to adopt the same messaging standard.

What customers purchase must extend beyond an initial record. They need to know when the issuer changes the event, which version is current and whether an amendment has been validated. Governing that information throughout the lifetime of each event forms part of the service for which the issuer agent is paid.

The proposed market therefore has an identifiable service, potential buyers and a reason for the source provider to participate. Downstream organisations retain part of the saving. The issuer agent earns a return. The issuer shares in the value through lower fees.

Taking the published industry estimates as a starting point, what could this commercial model deliver for its participants?

6. The Economics

Illustrating how the value could be shared.

The following illustration uses an issuer-agent arrangement, with one agent serving 1,000 issuers and producing 5,000 issuer-validated Structured Business Events each year. Ten custodians and forty institutional investors subscribe to the service. Although access could be provided through a data vendor, the example assumes direct subscriptions for simplicity.

ValueExchange’s 2024 research reports expected annual savings from a real-time, logicised data feed of USD7.10 million per custodian and USD0.68 million per investor[7]. Suppose the events supplied by this agent enable each subscriber to realise 10% of those benchmarks. That would mean annual savings of USD710,000 per custodian and USD68,000 per investor, or USD9.82 million across the participating organisations, before subscription charges and implementation costs.

The question is how a share of that saving could fund the service and reward the issuing party while leaving subscribers better off.

Suppose each custodian pays USD400,000 annually and each investor pays USD25,000. Together, they provide USD5 million in annual subscription revenue.

The savings benchmarks are drawn from ValueExchange’s research, which also includes estimated annual savings of USD3.61m per broker and USD1.35m per exchange/CSD. For simplicity, these additional beneficiaries are excluded from the illustration. The 10% attribution, participant numbers, pricing and revenue allocation are illustrative T-Scape assumptions, not findings of that research.

The subscription revenue would then fund the service and provide a return to the parties responsible for it.

On these assumptions, each issuer receives an average annual fee reduction of USD2,000. Of the issuer agent’s USD3 million allocation, USD1 million covers the illustrative technology and service delivery allowance, leaving USD2 million before tax and any costs outside that allowance.

Each custodian retains USD310,000 of annual savings after its subscription. Each investor retains USD43,000. Their implementation and any additional ongoing costs must be deducted to establish the net benefit.

The model therefore offers a financial reason for each party to participate. Downstream subscribers spend less overall. The issuer agent earns a return from providing the service. Issuers receive lower fees for supporting the creation and validation of authoritative events.

The amounts would vary with event coverage, complexity and the services supplied. Implementation and integration costs would affect the timing of returns, while some benefits would initially appear as capacity to handle more events rather than immediate budget reductions.

Those factors would inform pricing and the allocation of value. A distributor licensing events for onward supply might agree different terms from a custodian buying directly. In each case, the commercial arrangement connects the benefit received downstream with the service provided at source.

The purpose of the example is to make the proposed exchange tangible. A portion of the value currently consumed by repeated interpretation could fund authoritative information at source, reward the issuer agent and reduce issuer fees - while leaving paying beneficiaries better off.

The example shows how expenditure already incurred downstream could support a revenue-generating service at source. Establishing the appropriate prices and returns would be part of putting that commercial model into practice.

What, then, would paying participants be entitled to rely upon?

7. Trust Requires Accountability

What gives the Golden Record its authority?

The commercial value of the proposed service depends on what the market can rely upon. A Structured Business Event must faithfully represent the issuer’s intended business outcome, with identifiable responsibility for its validation and release.

Technology supports that process. AI can help interpret the final announcement and prepare the proposed event. Business rules can identify omissions, inconsistent dates or invalid combinations of terms. These capabilities assist preparation and review, but approval must come from the issuing party.

That approval is Business Validation.

The person performing it should be presented with the business meaning of the event: what is happening, which securities are affected, what options are available, which conditions apply and when actions must be taken. They should be able to review that information against the announcement, resolve questions and approve the intended outcome.

They should not need to understand message syntax or inspect an ISO 20022 structure. The technology must make validation straightforward for the people authorised to perform it.

A template can help collect information. Automated checks can establish whether required fields are populated and values are internally consistent. Business Validation goes further: the accountable party confirms that the structured event expresses what the issuer intends.

The service must preserve evidence of that approval. Recipients need to be able to establish what was approved, by whom, against which source and at what time. Changes must be traceable, with a clear distinction between a proposed amendment and an approved replacement.

This responsibility continues throughout the lifetime of each event. If the issuer changes a deadline, revises an option or withdraws the event, the service must govern the amendment and make the current validated position clear to recipients.

Distribution must preserve that authority. The approved Structured Business Event can be rendered into different messages, feeds or other required formats without asking the issuer to approve each technical representation separately. The service must ensure that those representations preserve the validated business meaning and identify any limitations in what a particular format can convey.

Issuer validation does not promise that errors can never occur. It establishes who is responsible for confirming the event, how that confirmation is recorded and how corrections are controlled. Commercial agreements would need to define those responsibilities and the consequences of failing to fulfil them.

Downstream organisations would retain responsibility for their own activities. A custodian may apply a client deadline; an investment manager must decide how to respond; other participants must calculate entitlements, submit instructions or process payments. Those responsibilities remain, supported by an authoritative statement of the underlying event.

The same principle matters as securities become tokenised and more servicing activity is automated. Automated execution depends on the business terms supplied to it. Establishing and governing the issuer’s intended outcome before those terms drive execution provides a foundation for that development.

For registrars, transfer agents and other issuer agents, this creates an opportunity extending beyond improvements to today’s announcements. They can provide an accountable source of business events that serves existing infrastructure and future digital markets.

That is the service the proposed commercial model would fund: the preparation, validation and continuing governance of an authoritative event on which others can act.

What would it take to put this operating and commercial model into practice?

8. Putting the Model into Practice

Turning recognised value into a commercial service.

The industry has spent decades discussing the benefits of better information at source. The opportunity now is to connect the operating model that creates those benefits with a commercial arrangement that rewards participation.

An issuer agent could offer a service built around the preparation, Business Validation and continuing governance of Structured Business Events. A CSD or data vendor could bring together issuing parties and downstream customers, using its existing relationships and distribution capabilities. Technology and process-governance partners could provide the means to deliver that service.

The defining feature is the connection between authority and payment. The issuing party confirms the intended business outcome before publication. Downstream beneficiaries pay for access to those validated events. The revenue supports the service and provides a return to the issuing party. Where an issuer agent delivers the service, part of that return is shared with its issuer clients through lower fees.

Existing initiatives may already provide structured submissions, templates or improved distribution. Those capabilities could contribute to this model. The commercial opportunity lies in bringing them together with accountable Business Validation and an arrangement through which downstream value flows back to source.

That can begin with an issuer agent’s existing client population or a defined service offered through a market infrastructure. It need not wait for every issuer, intermediary and investor to adopt the same arrangements. Participating organisations can realise value from the events covered while the rest of the market continues through existing channels.

The practical work is to establish the service, its responsibilities and its commercial terms. Event coverage, customer requirements and the cost of delivery would inform pricing. Evidence of avoided work would help participants refine those terms and share the value as the service develops.

For issuer agents and market infrastructures, this creates a reason to act: the prospect of a new revenue-generating service that strengthens their existing relationships and reduces costs for their customers.

The opportunity is to turn a recognised industry saving into a service that participants have a commercial reason to provide, buy and support.

9. Conclusion

The Price of Trust.

The value of better information at source has been recognised for decades. The industry’s recurring difficulty has been turning that value into an operating model that participants have a commercial reason to adopt.

The Last Interpretation proposed establishing the intended business outcome as a Structured Business Event, validated by the issuing party before publication. The Price of Trust connects that authority at source with the expenditure it can remove downstream.

The proposition is straightforward. Those who benefit from avoiding repeated interpretation and reconciliation fund the service. The issuing party earns a return for creating, validating and governing the authoritative event. An issuer delivering the service directly receives that return itself. Where an issuer agent delivers it, the issuer shares in the value through lower fees.

That provides a commercial answer to the registrar’s original challenge:

“You want us to do more, for your benefit - and do so at our cost.”

Those receiving the benefit would contribute to its creation through a share of the savings they realise. Those making it possible would be rewarded.

If the published industry estimates are broadly sound, even a share of the identified savings could support a substantial service opportunity. The illustrations in this paper show how that value could be distributed. The terms would depend on the participants and the service, but the principle holds: expenditure already incurred downstream can fund authority at source.

For issuer agents, CSDs and other market participants, the opportunity is to earn a return by enabling the investment chain to spend less. Bringing that service into operation would give practical effect to an ambition the market has discussed for years.

Trust is not free. But the industry is already paying for it many times over.

Why keep paying to recreate trust everywhere when the market could pay to establish it at source?

Sources:

1. S&P Global Market Intelligence, “The ever-elusive ‘Golden Record’ continues to haunt all Corporate Actions functions”, August 2021.

2. S&P Global Market Intelligence, “Future-Proofing Corporate Actions: Driving ROI Through Reimagined Data & Intelligent Automation”, June 2026.

3. SWIFT, “Fighting Friction in Corporate Actions: A Collaborative Innovation Pilot - Results Report”, March 2023.

4. Chainlink, “Establishing a Unified Standard for Asset Servicing with the Chainlink Platform, Blockchains, and AI”. September 2025.

5. ValueExchange and DTCC, Corporate Actions: A Team Sport, September 2025.

6. ValueExchange and DTCC, Corporate Actions: A Team Sport, “The True Scale of the Challenge”, September 2025.

7. ValueExchange, Asset Servicing Automation: Key Survey Findings, July 2024.