Branch Banking & Trust (BB&T) in the US – which has $130.8 billion in assets – has renewed its licence for the XSP corporate actions solution, with the addition of an interface to a second corporate actions data feed – DTC Redemption and Reorganization – to complement the data it already takes from Xcitek, formerly part of the same company as XSP but now owned by Interactive Data (Reference Data Review, April 2007).
Having first purchased XSP in 2004 and gone live with the data cleansing component of the solution and automated delivery of information to portfolio managers in 2005, BB&T has since implemented XSP’s web-based eTRAN module for automated notification and response capture of elections, as well as its Export File Utility to improve downstream processing of notifications and responses by automating delivery of this data to BB&T’s SunGard Addvantage accounting system.
Frank Piraino, managing director of global operations and client services at XSP, says the DTC Redemption and Reorganization files BB&T has now licensed will enable it to receive data directly from DTC (the US depository business of DTCC). “The bank was already using Xcitek data, and will now be taking in two feeds for more comprehensive coverage. XSP scrubs and normalises the data to create a golden copy and creates notifications to portfolio managers,” he says.
The DTC Redemption and Reorganization files are among the 30 different interfaces XSP offers out of the box, he adds – and for a North American firm taking Interactive Data/Xcitek and DTC data would be a pretty typical set-up. Getting the second feed up and running in XSP is straightforward, Piraino continues, since the Xcitek interface is already in place. Configuring XSP to implement preferences between the two sources in instances where there are discrepancies between the feeds is also quite a simple project, he reckons. XSP imposes no limit on the number of corporate actions data feeds a firm can utilise, though for a global firm the usual maximum would be four, two for Europe and two for North America, he suggests.
Roger Lieber, vice president of Trust Operations at BB&T, says the quality of XSP and the level of support it receives were key factors in its renewal decision.
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