Boston-headquartered investment manager Loomis, Sayles & Company is automating its corporate actions processing with CheckFree eVent. The firm, predominantly a fixed income house with some $105 billion in assets under management, is already a user of CheckFree TradeFlow for settlement instruction processing of cash securities and FX.
Loomis is currently in beta testing for the first phase of the roll-out of eVent, focusing on announcement capture. As well as taking announcements from custodians, Loomis also takes in data from vendor feeds, including Bloomberg, and will be automating the announcement capture from these feeds, Naren Patel, director, securities business development at CheckFree, says. “The timeframe is aggressive,” he adds. “By the end of this year, the goal is for Loomis to be live on full end-to-end automated corporate actions processing.”
Patel says a key driver for Loomis’s decision to automate corporate actions processing has been the US market’s move to adopt ISO 15022 standardised messaging. “Loomis has multiple custodians, and as its suppliers were moving to Swift standards, Loomis was finding it difficult to leverage and obtain scale without automation,” he says.
Loomis “spoke to all the usual suspects among the corporate actions systems providers”, Patel says. “We did a number of technical workshops with Loomis over a period of time, and it quickly transpired that our out-of-the-box solution had what they needed, without too much customisation or configuration being required. So we went very quickly from the technical workshop programme into an immediate beta and testing phase.” It may be worthy of note that Jan Snitzer, a vice president at Loomis, came from another Boston-based asset manager, MFS, which, in 2001, signed up to implement eVent (then sold by HelioGraph, prior to its acquisition by CheckFree). MFS did not ultimately go live on eVent, as the project was elbowed out by “other priorities”.
Implementation of CheckFree eVent is also under way at HSBC Securities (Reference Data Review, January 2007).
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