CheckFree Corporation successfully implemented its corporate actions application, CheckFree eVent at HSBC Securities Services.
The CheckFree eVent implementation is a key component of HSS’ strategic technology architecture project, which enhances its market-leading investment administration platform. In addition to automating corporate actions processing, the application delivers successful implementation of ISO15022 messages and market practice.
HSS is now able to create an electronic “golden record” of any announcement, by automatically processing and comparing announcements from custodians in ISO 15022 formats and corporate actions data vendors. At HSS, the CheckFree eVent solution replaces the market norm of numerous business teams receiving announcements in manual form (e.g. email, fax or letter).
“With CheckFree eVent we now have much greater visibility and control of our corporate actions processing, where we are seeing significant volume growth on the back of new mandates and market trends,” says Richard Godfrey, global COO of institutional fund services at HSS. “We have also created a new centralized ‘announcement validation team’ to leverage the benefits of the new solution. The team now has full responsibility for corporate actions announcement capture, data scrubbing, validation and publishing, realizing the standardization and control benefits of automation.”
The move to create a dedicated team focused on corporate actions processing also enables resources in other business units to focus on the subsequent tasks of onward processing of events such as fund manager notification, decision capture and instruction processing, CheckFree and HSBC say.
“We have worked hard with HSBC to build a flexible system to automate the announcement capture process, since the implementation and development of market practice is still evolving,” says Gary Mercer, managing director, CheckFree. “Corporate actions automation strengthens the link between clients and asset service providers with their use of ISO messaging over SWIFT. The flexibility of CheckFree eVent helps deliver a solution to deal with the complexity of processing over 60 different ISO corporate actions types and local market practices. We are delighted that this landmark implementation of CheckFree eVent has been a resounding success at HSS.”