Five corporate actions data trends reshaping markets in 2026

January 7, 2026

Corporate actions data is undergoing a fundamental shift in how it is valued and used across financial markets.

What was once treated as a back-office necessity is increasingly being recognised as a strategic asset that can support trading decisions, risk management and client engagement. As firms look to extract more value from data, corporate actions are moving higher up the agenda, with 2026 shaping up to be a pivotal year for change across the entire lifecycle.

LSEG Data & Analytics recently delved into the five corporate action trends in 2026.

Traditionally, corporate actions data sat firmly within the back office, supporting mandatory processing and regulatory obligations. Today, its relevance has expanded significantly. Traders, asset managers and risk teams are finding new ways to use corporate actions data across trading, portfolio optimisation and real-time decision-making. As these use cases continue to mature, 2026 is set to be a year of substantial change, driven by standardisation efforts, lower latency expectations and the increased use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).

LSEG’s Corporate Actions data is already widely trusted across the financial services industry for its depth and quality. Building on this foundation, LSEG is working across the full lifecycle of corporate actions data to reduce processing times, enhance coverage and apply AI and ML technologies to improve data sourcing and validation.

One of the most significant developments is the push for improved standardisation. Corporate actions are often announced in unstructured formats such as PDFs and HTML documents, making data extraction highly manual and time-consuming.

This not only delays dissemination but also increases operational and market risk. Greater standardisation of corporate action messages across the lifecycle has the potential to reduce latency, improve accuracy and lower processing costs. While ISO 20022 is widely viewed as the long-term standard and successor to ISO 15022, global adoption remains incomplete. ISO 20022 is already mandatory for cross-border payments on SWIFT and is expected to be fully adopted for corporate action messaging within the EU and UK by 2030.

Another key trend is the rising demand for debt corporate actions data. As fixed income investment has surged over recent years, corporate bond-related actions have become increasingly important. While this data continues to support middle- and back-office activities such as compliance and automation, it is now also being used for front-office applications, including trading and portfolio optimisation. Demand for broader and more granular debt corporate actions data is expected to continue to grow, it explained.

Reducing latency is also becoming critical as corporate actions data shifts towards value-generating use cases. Some traders and investors, particularly in APAC, are now seeking data delivery within an hour of an event occurring. This need is being reinforced by the global move towards shorter settlement cycles. The US, Canada, Mexico and Argentina are already operating on T+1 settlement, while the EU, Switzerland and UK are targeting a transition by October 2027.

AI and ML are playing an increasingly central role in addressing these challenges. Given the unstructured nature of many corporate actions announcements, these technologies are being deployed to automate data extraction, validation and processing. Over time, this is expected to significantly reduce manual intervention, minimise errors and further compress latency, LSEG said.

For more insights, read the full story here.