SMARTSTREAM LAUNCHES NEW CORPORATE ACTIONS SOLUTION AND DATA AND TRADE PROCESSING UTILITY

Posted September 15, 2009

LONDON – Transaction lifecycle management specialist SmartStream Technologies has launched a new version of its corporate actions solution, as well as a new shared data and trade processing utilities division.

The new division, DClear Utilities, will offer centralized processing of financial instruments across their entire lifecycle through an on-demand style platform, enabling clients to benefit from a shared service center model for common processing services.

“In the current financial market of decreasing margins and volume volatility, the need to reduce transaction costs through more efficient back-office processes that reduce trade breaks and increase risk controls has become even more urgent,” says John Mason, CEO, DClear Utilities. “We see that pressure is driving the trend towards the standardization of systems and processes that offer no strategic differentiation yet consume vast amounts of time, effort and money. The DClear model based around the shared, standardized delivery of commoditized functions for back-office processing and a centralized repository of standardized data delivers significant risk mitigation and reduces operational cost.”

The corporate actions solution, TLM Corporate Actions, features a new browser-based interface that presents the widest range of corporate action information on a single screen. Its thin client delivery also ensures a rapid roll out across an organization, to reduce the cost of ownership, according to SmartStream.

“In our experience, firms globally struggle with highly manual corporate actions processes that, in the current market conditions, create unnecessary risk and cost which directly impact customer service,” says Cyrus Daruwala, Managing Director, Asia Pacific, at industry consultancy Financial Insights. “It’s unnecessary because solutions such as SmartStream’s TLM Corporate Actions can easily automate much of the corporate actions event lifecycle and efficiently manage event volumes as they continue to rise. The advantage of this approach is that it eliminates the possibility of single points of processing failure, thereby increasing an institution’s operational risk control, whilst delivering complete and accurate event processing.”