Standard Chartered Bank has chosen GoldenSource Securities & Products to automate the creation of its golden copy corporate actions notifications. The Asian bank began looking for a corporate actions validation solution in early 2008 and began talking to the vendor about the implementation before year end, explains Gert Raeves, senior vice president of strategic business development and marketing at GoldenSource.
“After a very strong growth period in its securities services business, Standard Chartered wanted to strengthen its ability to support more products and more customers in an increasingly competitive market,” Raeves elaborates. “This project is a key pillar of a revitalised target operating model to help the bank accommodate growth and differentiate its offering.”
Prior to its selection of the GoldenSource solution, Standard Chartered also evaluated the Asset Control offering, says Raeves. However, the bank finally selected GoldenSource on the strength of its reference data capabilities. Giles Elliott, global product head at Standard Chartered Securities Services, explains: “Standard Chartered Bank has chosen to partner with GoldenSource because we feel its Securities & Products solution offers the best mix of functionality, architecture and domain expertise.”
This initial implementation of the GoldenSource solution will provide clean, validated corporate actions announcements to Standard Chartered’s custody platforms. The bank hopes that the ability to deliver standardised data functionality across multiple markets will allow it to realise cost savings and efficiencies in the face of a tough market environment.
According to the vendor, the solution allows Standard Chartered Bank to combine its own in-house sourced corporate action announcements with those from data vendor sources in various formats including Swift ISO15022, and provides a cleansed and validated golden copy of each announcement to its core processing platforms.
“Corporate actions announcements are a critical and high risk part of our customers’ business processes. This enables us to offer a superior quality of service and grow our business in a very competitive marketplace,” adds Elliott.
Raeves explains that the implementation has already reached its first milestone: “The project has already met a first major milestone this week – it is in phase one – production mode already, with inbound data feeds from Reuters and custodians implemented. The next phase and major business benefit will be delivered in the next phase – integrating into the SCB environment, which is scheduled for end of May.”
The vendor has seen strong interest from the Asian market, according to Raeves, especially in the securities services and buy side sectors. For many vendors in the data management space, Asia represents a land of opportunity, as budgets in the US and Europe have been feeling the squeeze lately. Competition in these markets however, is very similar to that in the rest of the world, as there are very few mature local offerings for data management, says Raeves.
GoldenSource has been focusing its attention on the Asian market over recent months and in January, it appointed a new national sales manager for India: Shashank Mishra. The vendor is hopeful that Asia will continue to see growth in the IT sector despite the poor global economic climate.
Hugh Stewart, vice president of sales for EMEA and Asia, explains: “India, amongst other Asian countries, looks very promising for us. We have a solid new business pipeline for 2009 in the region.”
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