BNY Mellon Asset Servicing has enhanced its Corporate Actions Online Services offering with the launch of a new global web-based notification and response system. The upgrade – available via BNY Mellon Asset Servicing’s web-based information delivery and transaction platform – is designed to give clients greater flexibility for managing corporate events, such as tender offers, conversions, mergers, exchanges, maturities, called bonds, rights, warrants, liquidations, bankruptcies, stock splits, stock distributions and put bonds.
Commenting on the drivers behind this latest release Steve Boor, manager of global information delivery, BNY Mellon Asset Servicing, says: “Client priority is behind most of the things that we do and this has bubbled near the top of the priorities – to get better efficiency, ease of use and risk mitigation in the area of corporate actions. Corporate actions is an area of very high exposure, tight deadlines and a lot of dynamic information that changes every day.
“You’ve got parties all around the globe that are involved in managing this information and really it’s an ideal application for a 24 hour global website that makes all this complex and dynamic high risk information both easy to use and easy to manage.”
Clients can now view mandatory and voluntary notifications online and submit an appropriate electronic response for either a single account or a consolidated notification for several accounts. Partial and full responses can also be submitted, while previously submitted responses can be withdrawn prior to the event deadline.
The corporate actions can be accessed from any browser, any time making it much faster and easier for clients, according to the vendor, with fewer clicks to get at the information to see a status of all their deadlines “at a glance” with a quick dashboard of information, and from there they drill down and filter the information using web capabilities and customise it to meet their needs.
“One nice thing about the new web version is that it really organises the client’s workflow,” says Boor. “We’ve set up four basic tabs around the information so when you click on corporate actions it brings you right into a tab of what responses are required, highlighting the things that you need to act on in the next 24/48 hours. There are other tabs for if you want to look at all your notices or if you want to view your audit trail of previous responses and also a tab dedicated to authorising your responses.”
With a broad range of clients – some small shops with maybe one or two people managing all the corporate actions to large clients with multiple departments and ultimately 100 people managing the whole corporate action function – BNY Mellon Asset Servicing wanted to give them the option to customise how they manage and authorise the corporate actions, whether it’s automatic, single authorisation or dual authorisation. “This customisation feature is to deal with the sophistication and size and type of investments and investment processes our clients have,” reckons Boor.
David Galli head of operations from Banca Popolare di Milano, a major client of BNY Mellon Asset Servicing, says: “This is a fantastic state of the art system. Not only is it very user-friendly but it will also help us to better manage the risks associated with corporate action events.”
