Best Corporate Actions Data Initiative: SmartStream

SmartStream is no stranger to winning awards across the WatersTechnology portfolio. In the corporate actions processing space, it won Best Corporate Actions Solution Provider in the Waters Rankings last year, and follows that success by winning this year’s Best Corporate Actions Data Initiative category. 

This award is in recognition of SmartStream’s repackaged TLM Corporate Actions OnDemand service, which allows organizations of all sizes to access the TLM Corporate Actions solution—which has been tried and tested, and is used by some of the world’s largest financial institutions—with greater ease and speed through what the company calls “model client configuration”.

Corporate actions processing is a notoriously complex, time-sensitive, event-driven process that is characterized by frequently changing event details, varying standards and interpretations, and multiple intermediaries. SmartStream’s TLM Corporate Actions is an automated processing engine that covers the complete event life cycle with active alerting capabilities. It offers a diary management approach to processing all International Organization for Standardization (ISO) event types and automatically generates milestones, key tasks and processing exceptions, which it routes to the appropriate workflow points. 

In 2011, SmartStream launched TLM Corporate Actions OnDemand as a Software-as-a-Service model. Clients who sign up for this service receive a fully hosted corporate actions processing platform from SmartStream’s dedicated cloud environment. One of the biggest steps undertaken by the company since then has been the introduction of model client configuration. 

“SmartStream has mutualized knowledge from its extensive client base and has combined that with industry standards and best practice to create the model client, which is a series of preconfigured components, from which clients can pick the elements of the solution they require. The model accelerates implementation times and reduces total cost of ownership,” says Robert Glassfield, TLM Practice Manager at SmartStream. 

The model client configuration incorporates as best practices all ISO event definitions and communications protocols, information provider and processing party interfaces along with Securities Market Practice Group and National Market Practice Group recommendations. In the past year, the company has signed up a dozen new clients for the service.

“Considerable investment has been made by SmartStream in its corporate actions processing technology,” Glassfield says. For example, the solution has recently been expanded to include processing of ISO 20022 messages and support for their interoperability with ISO 15022 messages. Proxy voting capabilities have also been added. The company has also designed a new interface, which is easier to navigate and supports flexible reporting. 

Read more about the Inside Market Data & Inside Reference Data Awards 2019 winners