Buy-Side Technology Awards: Best Overall Buy-Side Product for 2011—SmartStream

Unlike the rest of the Buy-Side Technology Awards winners, which were revealed before the Nov. 4 luncheon in London, the best product and best overall technology provider were announced on the day. These final two awards were decided by Victor Anderson and Anthony Malakian, and, although the panelists’ feedback had a bearing on the outcome of these categories, they were not directly involved in selecting the winner. As has been the case over the previous four years, all of the winners in the other 22 category winners were considered for this honor.

While there were a number of other highly considered nominees for this award—including RIMES Technologies, BI-SAM’s B-One product, StatPro’s new Revolution cloud-based offering, and the Cadis EDM platform—we settled on SmartStream as the best overall buy-side product for 2011.

For what is a nascent category in the Buy-Side Technology Awards, SmartStream has established such an impressive résumé in the reconciliations space that it was able to also nab this penultimate award. Reconciliations have become an important part of buy-side firms' overall IT blueprint as they look to curb their risk exposure and create efficiencies that will ultimately help them to cut costs—a necessity in today’s challenging environment.

What sets SmartStream’s TLM Reconciliations–Premium offering apart from the competition is that it is now available on-demand as a software-as-a-service (TLM OnDemand) platform, which, one of our judges noted, “is a real bonus for smaller firms.”

Several major buy-side firms have signed on as clients this year.

A solution that offers efficiency upgrades, while reducing risk and cutting costs—in an environment of unprecedented regulatory upheaval and market volatility—simply cannot be ignored. The next 12 months are clearly going to be challenging for the buy side—expect a product like TLM Reconciliations-Premium to take on further importance. —AM