HSBC Securities Services (HSS) has implemented a new corporate actions processing system that has given the firm greater visibility and control and helped it create a dedicated team to further streamline the corporate actions processing lifecycle.
The system, CheckFree’s eVent, has become a key component of HSS's strategic technology architecture project to enhance its investment administration platform. In addition to automating corporate actions processing, eVent also delivers ISO 15022 messaging.
With the new system in place, HSS is now able to create an electronic "golden record" of any announcement, by automatically processing and comparing announcements from custodians in ISO 15022 formats and from corporate actions data vendors. The exceptions management and audit capabilities within eVent have further strengthened operational controls.
Also, at HSS the CheckFree eVent solution replaces the market norm of numerous business teams receiving announcements in manual forms (e.g., email, fax or letter), which leads to a time-consuming and control-challenging processing. Instead, a move to create a dedicated team focused on corporate actions processing has enabled resources in other business units to focus on the subsequent tasks of onward processing of events such as fund manager notification, decision capture and instruction processing.
“With CheckFree eVent we now have much greater visibility and control of our corporate actions processing, where we are seeing significant volume growth on the back of new mandates and market trends," said Richard Godfrey, global COO of institutional fund services at HSS. "We have also created a new centralized 'announcement validation team' to leverage the benefits of the new solution. The team now has full responsibility for corporate actions announcement capture, data scrubbing, validation and publishing, realizing the standardization and control benefits of automation."
CheckFree is currently in the process of migrating its solutions to a .NET-based EPL (enhanced portfolio lifecycle) platform by year-end. The company announced in June that it plans to embed eVent into the EPL. The company is also in the process of being acquired by Fiserv in a transaction that is supposed to complete by year-end, but has stated that the acquisition would not alter the EPL plans.