Building Euronext's Shareholder Intelligence, From Spreadsheets to a Single Console

Every quarter, listed companies need to answer a deceptively simple question: who owns our shares? Under the EU's Shareholder Rights Directive (SRD II), this is known as shareholder identification, or “know your shareholder.” For Euronext's Corporate Services team, answering that question for hundreds of clients across multiple markets meant relying on a process that couldn't keep up: spreadsheets, manual reconciliation, and a size limit on which companies they could even take on.

Over the past year, Critical Software has worked alongside Euronext's technical team on two projects: one rebuilding how shareholder identification gets done, and one giving Euronext's clients a new way to see who's buying and selling their stock.

Euronext's shareholder analysis service, internally branded SHAN, used to run on individual analysts working in their own Excel files. Progress was hard to share, version conflicts were common, and each analyst's report looked a little different from the next. Most limiting of all, the sheer size of some share registers meant the team had to turn away some of the largest, most complex listed companies in Europe as clients.

Working with Euronext's team, we rebuilt the process behind SHAN, replacing the patchwork of spreadsheets with a single, consolidated console. Every analyst now works from the same system and produces reports in the same standardized format, regardless of the client's size. We've already tested the new console against share registers at the scale of Europe's largest companies, with encouraging results. That means Euronext can now take on large, complex clients the old process couldn't handle.

That consistency matters as much as the added capacity: a small-cap client and one of Euronext's largest now get the same quality of report.

The second project is in a different part of Euronext's business: the IR Portal, a client-facing platform where listed companies configure widgets to monitor activity in their shareholder base. Critical Software built the backend for its Top Shareholders widget, which shows companies their monthly buyers and sellers.

The widget is already live for 185 clients. It combines data from FactSet with Euronext's own Norwegian VPS data, a source that hadn't previously been available in this format. That gives issuers a shareholder view they couldn't get from a single source before.

Both projects add up to less manual reconciliation and more automated, standardized infrastructure built to handle more clients and more data. For SHAN, that means a growing share of the process running through the new console rather than individual spreadsheets. For the IR Portal, it means the Top Shareholders widget is a first step. Euronext's team is already looking at how to extend the same approach to other market-activity signals for its clients.

For Critical Software, both projects follow the same pattern: take a process that depended on one analyst's spreadsheet or one person's know-how, and rebuild it as a system other people can run consistently, without losing their judgment.

This piece was developed in collaboration with Euronext's Corporate Services team.