DST Global Solutions has secured a global reseller agreement with corporate actions specialist XSP. The agreement covers both an integrated corporate actions module for the company’s HiPortfolio asset servicing solution and direct sales of the XSP software. DST will initially play on its strength in the Australian investment management market with a view to becoming a corporate actions leader not only among its customers, but also in the broader market.
According to Geoff Harries, global head of asset servicing at DST, “Many of our clients have been reviewing their corporate actions capabilities over the past six to 12 months, and they are now looking for an automated solution that will reduce operational risk, reduce costs and provide support when scaling business. To build a best-in-class solution would take a significant and dedicated investment. So, as XSP already has one, it made sense not to build but to partner.”
DST looked at potential corporate actions partners before selecting XSP on the basis of an aligned go-to-market strategy. With about 70% of its 130-plus customers in the Australia and Asia-Pacific regions, markets where XSP is not yet strong, DST is planning broad corporate actions marketing campaigns across these regions in the fourth quarter and will be talking to customers elsewhere on a one-to-one basis.
“The Australian market is not as mature as the UK and US markets in terms of corporate actions, so we want to solve the market challenge there, not just the HiPortfolio challenge,” says Harries.
Both the company’s HiPortfolio corporate actions module and its stand-alone offering are available immediately. The HiPortfolio module has been integrated in the larger solution and is designed to provide a single workflow for corporate actions processing, including data cleansing, notification and response, and then investment accounting updates of entitlements. Says Harries: “This will benefit our clients by providing a centralised announcement capture capability and improve client service through increased timeliness and quality of notifications.”
As well as offering the deployed version of XSP v5, DST is also discussing a broader relationship that could include resale of the software vendor’s XSPrisa hosted solution for smaller HiPortfolio clients that do not want to implement a corporate actions solution. To date, DST is discussing XSP with three large HiPortfolio users and hopes to convert them and more ahead of the next upgrade of HiPortfolio including the XSP powered corporate actions module next year.
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