sheesh. I'm talking about us paying for a file delivery service because we want to make a report about something like total number of dividends announced last week or something like that. You'd be able to do that with a daily corporate action file from about 25 different vendors. But a corporate action file contains a lot more than dividend announcements!
The vendor says that for records of type A, characters 12-17 represent a unique ID or something else that is very boring. For records of type B, characters 15-25 represent another ridiculously dumb thing that I do not care about, but the vendor says it will never be missing and will always validate with a checksum algorithm.
I'm being pretty opaque on purpose.
For this particular SPAC merger, there is always something wrong with the record. And I, being someone who neither built the system nor is authorized to change it, must go in, read the stupid text about the buzzword-filled company description, count 723 empty spaces on a single line to find where the error is located, verify that something is missing, and go have a little meeting where we discuss whether to ask the vendor to fix and resend, edit the file to put dummy data in, or just delete the damn record because nobody on our end cares if it exists.
I mean, I guess that could be nefarious, but it's really not. We have to pay extra to get only the stuff we want, so we just get it all and let the hapless developers deal with it.