A corporate action data feed is a service that delivers details of corporate events, such as dividends, splits, mergers, rights issues and redemptions, in a structured electronic form that receiving systems can read automatically. Feeds are supplied by commercial data vendors, stock exchanges, numbering agencies, depositories and custodians. Each record identifies the security, the event type, the key dates, the rates or ratios and any options, and is updated as the issuer adds or changes information.
Firms use feeds to drive corporate action event capture: the incoming data is validated, compared across sources and merged into a single trusted record, often called golden source data. That record updates the security master file and triggers entitlement calculation, notification and pricing adjustments. Because an issuer's corporate action announcement is usually free text, vendors interpret it differently, so most firms take more than one feed and investigate conflicts. Feeds are delivered alongside other instrument reference data.