Powering Smarter Post-Trade Outcomes in a 24-Hour Market

Global markets are moving toward a new reality: trading that never sleeps.

At the same time, investors are more engaged and regulators are reshaping how shareholder rights are exercised and reported.

For post-trade teams in Asia Pacific, this creates both pressure and opportunity. In our recent session at Interact Singapore , “Powering Smarter Post-Trade Outcomes,” Suhyeon Park and Sera Lee from S&P Global Market Intelligence explored how accurate, timely corporate actions data can lower operational risk, enhance portfolio returns and support scalable growth.

24-hour trading: new complexity for corporate actions

Extended market hours are becoming a defining trend. Retail investors now account for a significant share of equity volume in the U.S., with participation even higher in markets such as China and Korea. These digitally native investors expect to trade what they want, when they want.

Exchanges are responding. NASDAQ and NYSE have announced plans for 24-hour trading, while the Korea Exchange is extending hours with a roadmap to full 24-hour trading and a move to T+1. Major hubs such as Hong Kong and London are exploring similar measures.

For corporate actions, this is a structural shift. Mandatory events such as dividends are driven by trade date. In a 24-hour window, two trades on the same calendar day can have different entitlements based solely on execution time. Voluntary events such as tender or exchange offers still require investors to elect by fixed deadlines. Longer trading hours do not extend those deadlines, which increases the cost of delays or errors.

Standard trade cutoffs, for example at 8 PM Eastern time, mean post-trade systems must ingest exchange-assigned trade dates in real time and apply them consistently across affirmation, netting, and settlement.

Even a straightforward dividend can now require multi-hour trading suspensions and price adjustments. At scale, across mergers, spin-offs, rights issues and splits, this turns occasional disruptions into routine, high-volume workflows that firms must manage without introducing new risk.

Essentials for smarter post-trade

Traditional end-of-day batch jobs are no longer enough. Firms need automation engines that operate continuously, capturing voluntary instructions throughout the day and processing corporate actions as events occur.

This helps lower operational risk by reducing manual intervention and duplicate data entry, ensuring entitlements are calculated consistently as trade dates update and supporting higher volumes without linear increases in headcount.

Automation depends on the data feeding it. Ex-date flags, reference data, price adjustments and exchange-assigned trade dates must update as close as possible to trade cutoffs. That often means adjusting batch schedules closer to key deadlines, adding intra-day data cycles and using APIs to refresh corporate actions data throughout the day.

When data is delayed, even strong automation can misfire, increasing the risk of trading on stale data, misvaluing portfolios or missing client commitments.

Precision in corporate actions and proxy data is the foundation of fully informed decision-making. Recent complex events, including restructurings and reorganizations, show how quickly incorrect assumptions about exchange ratios, listings or event classifications can translate into financial and reputational loss.

By combining high-quality source data with expert validation and full event histories, firms can reduce breaks and exceptions, make more confident judgments when market signals conflict and give clients clearer explanations of complex events.

The rising importance of proxy data

Sera also highlighted a second major trend: proxy data is becoming a strategic asset.

Retail investors are increasingly exercising voting rights and influencing governance outcomes. Regulators are proposing changes that require intermediaries to transmit meeting information and report full, non-net voting counts. At the same time, capital is global while governance remains local, making it difficult for investors to compare agendas and resolutions across markets.

Reliable, structured proxy data provides a common language to apply consistent governance standards across portfolios, analyze and compare proposals across jurisdictions and enable clients to participate more actively in stewardship.

Turning complexity into advantage

For APAC firms, corporate actions are no longer a back-office detail. They are central to risk control, investment performance and client experience.

By investing in accurate, timely data and scalable automation, firms can lower operational risk through standardized, automated corporate actions processing, enhance portfolio returns by giving portfolio managers, traders and clients better, more timely information on entitlements and elections and support growth by handling higher volumes, new markets and new products on an efficient, scalable platform.

At S&P Global Market Intelligence, we work with institutions across the region to help them turn corporate actions and proxy data into an advantage: powering smarter post-trade outcomes in a 24-hour world.