BST Awards 2018: Best Buy-Side Corporate Actions Platform—SmartStream Technologies

The best corporate actions platform category is one of three new categories added to the 2018 Buy-Side Technology Awards line-up, the other two being the implementation categories on pages 68 and 69. It’ll come as little surprise to many corporate actions practitioners that SmartStream Technologies is the first recipient of this award, following its success in the corresponding category at this year’s Waters Rankings, Waters’ only awards program where the winners are determined exclusively by its readers. SmartStream is no stranger to the BST Awards winners’ circle having won the best buy-side back-office technology provider category in last year’s awards, in addition to wins in the best implementation at a sell-side firm and the best sell-side reconciliation platform categories in the 2017 Sell-Side Technology Awards. 

It goes without saying that the corporate actions market is important to the UK-headquartered firm, even though the bulk of its capital markets presence is down to its widely used TLM Reconciliations platform, responsible for delivering so much success for the firm over the years, and its SmartStream Reference Data Utility, winner of the best enterprise data management initiative category at this year’s IMD/IRD Awards. 

That said, SmartStream has recently thrown much of its considerable weight behind its TLM Corporate Actions platform, an offering that targets both the buy side and the sell side, which represents the heart of the firm’s corporate actions strategy. “It’s a real-time processing engine that covers the complete event lifecycle from announcement capture to golden-record management, position management, event broadcasting and communication, election management, entitlement-generation and posting,” explained Adam Cottingham, product manager of TLM Corporate Actions, earlier this year when speaking to Waters in the wake of SmartStream’s win in the best corporate actions platform category at the Waters Rankings. “You have a technology that supports all of those processes, but it also involves the processing logic, which is a mixture of industry standards and experience within our client base,” he says. 

Recently, SmartStream added support for ISO 15022 and 20022 messaging standards, while the firm’s next milestone is delivering a new user interface (UI) for the platform that will see the deployment of HTML5 screens for the main UI and portal. This, according to the firm, will leverage the TLM View capabilities of the platform, which have already been rolled out across its TLM Reconciliations platform. SmartStream will also focus on managing the continuous improvement cycle for its model client configuration, whether they are industry changes applied to ISO standards and regulations or best practices defined by its various clients in their given markets.