SST Awards 2018: Best Implementation at a Sell-Side Firm—SmartStream Technologies

This year, SmartStream Technologies emerged on top, thanks to the implementation of its TLM Fees and Expense Management platform at Credit Suisse, an offering designed to allow firms to manage their variable expenses through an end-to-end automated process, across high volumes of transactional information, and accurately and transparently apportion fees.  

In 2017, SmartStream and Credit Suisse announced the expansion of their existing agreement around the processing of invoices and reconciliations to include listed derivatives brokerage fees, complementing the managed service for the processing of invoices and reconciliations within the Swiss bank’s over-the-counter (OTC) fixed-income derivatives, US listed equity options and cash equities businesses across brokerage, clearing and exchange fees operations. By centralizing the entire cost management ecosystem across all service providers from receipt of invoices to automatic fee calculations, accruals, reconciliations and payments, the bank has enhanced controls and transparency to support greater cost optimization.

“The challenge that you have in the current climate is developing a deep, empirical understanding of what your cost structures are,” explains Vincent Kilcoyne, executive vice president of product management at SmartStream Technologies. “For this purpose, we were expanding our TLM Fees and Expense Management solution to provide Credit Suisse with increased accuracy and confidence around their brokerage fees. We needed to be able to provide granularity across asset classes, but we also needed to automate that, while recognizing the key drivers associated with a global bank of the magnitude, depth and diversity of Credit Suisse. We had to be able to capture all that information from a geographic perspective, with all of the different nuances associated with regional relationships, cost structures, ladders and behaviors, and bring all of that information in, in all its different formats, in large volumes, and process it in a short period of time so that we could drive improved decision making.”  

Past winners of this category include Caplin Systems (2013), Torstone Technology (2014), and Numerix (2015), while New York-based AxiomSL was the recipient for the past two years, courtesy of its collaboration with Standard Chartered Bank on its Bank of England (BOE) statistical reporting requirements (2016) and its work with State Street on its federal statistical reporting obligations (2017).