Friday’s widespread systems outage as a result of the CrowdStrike software update into devices running Microsoft Windows laid bare the current fallibility of the regulatory news reporting service for London-listed companies.
While the majority of the primary information providers were unaffected by the move, the London Stock Exchange’s own Regulatory News Service – commonly known as RNS – failed to disseminate the usual flood of corporate updates from 7am.
The RNS service was keen to explain to issuers their responsibility in terms of how to ensure they met minimum requirements. But when it came to the news flow of price sensitive information, subsequent market impacts laid bare the shortcomings here.
One example was FTSE-250 listed Bridgepoint, which published a trading update noting a better-than-expected performance in the first half, leading to management upping guidance both for the current full year and the next one, too.
Arguably, only those who were expecting Bridgepoint to make a statement knew to hunt this information out that morning. The positive sentiment that followed the announcement sent the share price up more than 11% at one point. But it took several hours of trading to get there and the peak was achieved only after the update was finally published on the regulatory wire.
Technical glitches are inevitable, but the real failure here stems from the fact there is no single source comprehensively covering UK companies and their filing dates. That’s why at Investegate we are challenging this situation with the imminent launch of IAS – Investegate Announcement Service.
While this is primarily offering a valuable, indexed investor relations solution, we are also enabling any listed company to publish their key reporting dates free of charge.
Friday’s technical failure laid bare the extent to which markets can be impacted by relying on a single conduit to advise that an update has been made, with the length of time it took for markets to price in the Bridgepoint news emphasising the extent of the failure.
We want London to be the highest quality market in the world – IAS can help support that.
