BST Awards 2023: Best buy-side corporate actions platform—SmartStream

Overview

The TLM Corporate Actions platform is designed to help buy-side firms improve their corporate actions lifecycle management processes and reduce various costs. Firms are looking to standardize and automate corporate actions processing as the next step in their digital transformation. High levels of automation are now available to market participants in the corporate actions arena, providing them with smarter ways to mitigate risk and refine business processes.

The solution  

TLM Corporate Actions offers users automation as a means of minimizing manual work and errors in corporate actions processing. Its user interface (UI) is designed to simplify corporate actions management and provide users with access to critical information. Real-time reporting and analytics further boost efficiency, enabling better decision-making.

Secret sauce 

TLM Corporate Actions integrates newly released analytical and risk dashboards, supporting event parameter overviews directly related to operational risk. This enables processing teams to prioritize efforts on an event-by-event basis and provides them with critical control checkpoints. The “model client” provides a standardized, pre-configured model that expedites time to market. Quarterly updates introduce new functionality like standard settlement instructions, claims processing, and operational dashboards.

Recent milestones

• New UI for TLM Corporate Actions, UX dashboards, entitlement editing, dividend wizard, and proxy
• The platform uses event-driven automation and real-time processing for governance of all corporate actions, reducing errors, improving efficiency, and lowering costs
• OnDemand availability provides a solution for T+1 settlement preparation, eliminating lengthy implementation and infrastructure burdens 

Future objectives 

• Grow the team for managed services/outsourcing, client experience and delivery. The client experience and delivery team includes product management, client governance, risk and control, managed services and OnDemand/SaaS support, global solution delivery, and delivery engagement management.
• Extend the firm’s OnDemand/SaaS offering.
• Embed AI and machine learning across the firm’s entire product suite.

Why they won

SmartStream is back in the BST Awards winners’ circle, but this year it is thanks to its TLM Corporate Actions platform as opposed to its perennially successful reconciliations and reference data offerings, underlining its versatility across the middle and back offices. Corporate actions processing has emerged in recent years as an area of the business that buy-side firms must manage accurately and efficiently because of the material impact such messages/information has on their portfolios. TLM Corporate Actions is designed to manage the bulk of the grunt work associated with corporate actions processing, freeing up workers to focus on more manually intensive, higher-value tasks.