WTax and Cecabank sign collaboration agreement to digitise tax reclaims and enhance end-investor tax recovery yields

The collaboration extends the value chain for fund managers depositing with Cecabank and provides them with a unique competitive advantage in protecting the interests of their unitholders. The alliance transforms the processing of tax refunds through end-to-end digitisation, increases efficiencies, and heightens the proactive and expedited recovery of all eligible withholding tax on foreign investments for investment funds and pension funds.
By WTax

Cecabank, Spain’s leading custody and depositary bank, has signed an agreement with WTax, a world leading withholding tax recovery service provider, to furnish and facilitate integrated, straight-through-processing tax solutions for Cecabank’s custody tax services. 

The agreement facilitates the provision of services that will allow Cecabank and its clients to have automatic access to enhanced tax reclaim mechanisms, including additional tax-service market coverage, thereby increasing end investment tax-recovery yields for investors. Speed to market and end-to-end automated process flows will also be prominent attributes of the Custodian-WTax collaboration, delivering efficiencies, transparency and risk mitigation for Cecabank.

Cecabank has begun to offer this solution to asset managers who already deposit with the bank, allowing the manager, depending on the type of vehicle (investment funds, pension funds, SICAVs and voluntary pension plans -EPSVs) to claim foreign withholding tax refunds in European markets.

“Cecabank’s fundamental objective is to accompany our clients on their business expansion journey, offering them the best solutions according to the latest market trends,” says Aurora Cuadros, Corporate Director of Securities Services at Cecabank.

“This implies a process of continuous improvement that allows us to offer increasingly transparent services. The alliance developed with WTax is part of Cecabank’s value-added strategy to offer enhanced services related to the Securities Services value chain, providing clients with a major step in optimizing tax refund flows. In turn, this provides our clients the opportunity to add a greater level of predictability to their operational flows which ultimately contributes to bottom-line growth.”, concludes Aurora.

Daniel Ginsburg, CEO of WTax, further emphasises that “WTax’s Custodian Tax product solutions are built upon our deep industry knowledge and investment in tax processing automation. The solutions provide multiple benefits to existing Tax Service models that custodians currently offer and allow WTax to support custodians with a proactive approach to constant international tax legislation changes and heightened regulatory oversight, all of which is complimented with our agile technology.”

Focusing on the current environment, Daniel adds, “With the increase in digitisation, current tax processing is often outdated within the globalised environment of cross-border investments. Cecabank’s commitment to enhancing client experience is reflected in their tax product strategy with the WTax affiliation and we look forward to supporting Cecabank in offering their clients access to withholding tax reclaims in non-standard markets and ECJ claims, as well as securing enhanced time-to-market delivery”.

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