BST Awards 2019: Best Buy-Side Corporate Actions Platform—FIS

Corporate actions processing is often a complex and disjointed process, and firms’ balance sheets rely on their ability to make sense of them. FIS wins this year’s best corporate actions platform category, one of its two wins in this year’s Buy-Side Technology Awards.

The XSP platform for corporate actions is a hosted, SaaS-based solution that supports more than 30 market data vendor feeds, and users benefit from a host of workflows and robotic process automation-powered technology.

Andrew Bateman, executive vice president of capital market solutions at FIS, cites reconciling disparate data sources as one of the main challenges facing the firm’s buy-side clients. FIS offers its users the option of sorting through the data themselves or outsourcing parts or all of that burden to FIS by way of its Business Process as a Service (BPaaS). “Typically, our clients are notified of corporate actions events from various sources, such as their custodians or data vendors,” he says. “They are faced with the task of matching like announcements together and sorting through the noise to identify the cleanest version of the truth.”

In a typical corporate actions process, once clients figure out what the event is about, they must then identify which account holders it impacts and notify them before alerting their custodian. Some custodians require elections to be entered manually via their own portal, Bateman says, although XSP’s Swift messaging capabilities further automate this process. Over the last year, FIS has rolled out a new Corporate Actions Risk module that helps quantify and manage firms’ market exposure. The module was built by the XSPertise team with FIS’ newly-acquired partner, BaseVenture.

Bateman says the developers and product teams are constantly reviewing ways to minimize clicks and simplify clients’ day-to-day use of the system, adding that he’s proud of the platform’s active user base, which influences certain aspects of FIS’ quarterly software releases. Not only does it give clients direct input on features, but the arrangement allows them to get to market faster.

—RN