Corporate Actions Managed Services Use Case Series: Use Case #3

Introduction: The Intersection of Corporate Actions and Managed Services

The evolution of managed services has been a dynamic journey marked by continued expansion and innovation. Initially, financial service providers used traditional technologies and break-fix services to cater to customers' needs. However, as businesses became more reliant on technology, the need for proactive support grew, giving birth to managed services.

Recent years, particularly shaped by the pandemic, have witnessed a rapid transformation, with a heightened focus on continuous innovation, remote work, and agility. In response, the adoption of managed services has intensified within the financial sector as firms continue to look for strategies to safeguard their operations and define a growth-oriented approach in the ever-changing economy.

Corporate actions operations teams, working with highly manual processes lacking automation, are taking steps to alleviate this pressure and control infrastructure costs, all while striving to reduce the risk and disruptions caused by staff attrition resulting in a shortage of expertise.

This three-part blog series focuses on our experience working with our corporate actions clients and supporting them as they move from on-premises to managed services. Utilizing our full end-to-end workflow solutions can relieve their operations teams from day-to-day management to focus on the core business.

Use Case 3: Cloud Managed Services - Empowering with Enhanced Efficiency

In the past, financial institutions operated their own data centers, acquiring hardware and managing applications within their premises. They would often need to invest in additional hardware to either expand existing applications or accommodate new ones. This approach posed several challenges for organizations in terms of:

• Initial capital investment: Financial institutions faced the burden of significant upfront costs when setting up and maintaining their own data centers and hardware infrastructure.
• Scalability concerns: The challenge of adapting to fluctuating demands and expanding operations while managing on-premise systems often led to scalability limitations and delays in growth.
• Compliance and Security: Financial institutions must ensure compliance with regulatory mandates and adhere to security protocols, encompassing physical security measures and the implementation of access controls as specified.
• Maintenance and support responsibilities: Financial institutions were tasked with the ongoing maintenance and support of their on-premise applications, requiring dedicated resources and expertise to ensure optimal performance and reliability.

In recent years, the landscape of information technology infrastructure has undergone a significant transformation. The focus has shifted from traditional on-premise deployment - once the cornerstone of enterprise IT strategies — to Cloud managed services managed by a service provider. This shift is fueled by a multitude of factors including technological advancements, evolving business needs, enhancing operational efficiency and staying ahead in an ever-evolving technological landscape. In this era of digital transformation, more organizations are considering moving away from on-premise deployments to Cloud managed services as a strategic imperative. Cloud managed services, as opposed to traditional on-premise deployments, offer a myriad of advantages that significantly expedite the time it takes for businesses to go from ideation to execution.

S&P Global Market Intelligence Cloud Managed Service

In line with market trends, more financial institutions are adopting S&P Global Market Intelligence's Cloud Managed Services for corporate actions, entrusting S&P's experts to manage their technology and infrastructure transformation, enabling them to focus on core business operations for corporate actions processing. These services encompass a wide array of offerings, spanning from infrastructure provisioning to continuous maintenance and seamless application upgrades. Leveraging the power of automation for provisioning of resources and deployments enables faster upgrade cycles and seamless deployment of new features and multiple releases. This streamlined approach has improved time-to-market by threefold.

The Cloud Managed Services consists of a shared pool of subject matter experts (SME) in services and domain capabilities. This shared pool of SMEs helps in lowering the total cost of ownership of maintaining teams by 50%.

Traditionally, the procurement time for on-premise hardware typically spans between 3-6 months, contingent upon the scale of requirements. However, with S&P Global Market Intelligence Cloud Managed Services and the utilization of cloud elasticity, this procurement cycle is condensed to mere hours, facilitating instant scalability to address the fluctuating demands of corporate actions events. In the conventional setup, once hardware is procured, it remains in use for extended periods due to the absence of scaling-down options. Nevertheless, with on-demand scaling out and scaling In capabilities, the surge in hardware demand becomes temporary and can be downsized once requirements are met. This eliminates the need for the initial purchase or refresh costs associated with physical infrastructure. Furthermore, there are no expenses related to data centers, such as: facility maintenance, security, cooling, and ongoing upkeep. Consequently, this results in a substantial cost reduction of up to 40%.

S&P Global Market Intelligence Cloud Managed Service takes the burden of regulatory compliance and security aspects away from customers. The offering is System and Operation Controls 1 & 2 (SOC 1 & SOC 2) compliant and adheres to industry standards around security.

S&P Global provides industry-leading data, software and technology platforms and managed services to tackle some of the most difficult challenges in financial markets. We help our customers better understand complicated markets, reduce risk, operate more efficiently and comply with financial regulation.

This article was published by S&P Global Market Intelligence and not by S&P Global Ratings, which is a separately managed division of S&P Global.