For Don Forecki, director of investment operations at Northwestern Mutual Life in Milwaukee, the challenge was to process corporate actions without going to each custodian’s proprietary system.

“We wanted to make the process more consistent.” After evaluating vendors, it chose Xcitek’s XSP (see LaSalle, p. 42) to automate the corporate actions. But that still left the issue of how to get feeds from the banks without interfacing to each one separately.

He turned to Infomediary, a service provider for asset managers at Brown Brothers Harriman. At the time Infomediary had feeds from 130 banks, a number that has increased significantly since.

“We were dealing with the larger banks which were SWIFT-ready, so we used SWIFT to bring in those feeds,” said Forecki. Northwestern is not a member of SWIFT, but it can connect through Infomediary. He persuaded Fidelity’s ActionsExchange, a provider of corporate action data, and Xcitek to work together to provide him with feeds of new information at least five times a day.

Data from Xcitek feeds into Northwestern’s PAM accounting system, and that updates the Bloomberg trading platform through automated links, Forecki added. He also uses Infomediary for foreign trades and will soon use it for foreign exchange, because Bloomberg doesn’t offer the services he wants in those areas.

Forecki is making progress in achieving STP, but he is still frustrated by many small problems, such as the lack of standardization in corporate actions.

“I can get a corporate action from different banks and the options are in a different order for the same action,” he said. He has also found it difficult to get banks to send out regular corporate action updates on SWIFT. While they updated their proprietary links in real-time, they often updated over SWIFT once a day.

“It’s been an uphill struggle to get corporate actions via the SWIFT network in real-time,” he said.

www.nmfn.com

www.xcitek.com

www.bbh.com/infomediary/