Markit’s renewal and extension of its corporate actions processing platform deal with XSP will allow it to expand its operations to serve more customers and make more calculations while maintaining accuracy and timeliness.
As part of the renewal, Markit has added XSP’s Headline Indices functionality to the XSP v5 platform it operates in-house. According to Paul Grimes, managing director at Markit, the new functionality will allow the company to manage all corporate actions affecting individual clients’ portfolios of securities, ensuring all dividends information, for example, is properly validated across the multiple data sources it uses.
“XSP enables us to streamline some of our more complex processes and make our operations more scalable,” says Grimes. “The extension of our agreement strengthens our relationship with XSP and provides a basis for future product enhancements.”
Grimes says Markit has used XSP as its corporate actions processing platform for the past four years. Markit uses the platform to process corporate actions data affecting clients’ portfolios. Data is derived from a range of corporate actions suppliers. The XSP system is capable of handling feeds from the likes of Bloomberg, Interactive Data, Thomson Reuters and others.
He says that enhancements made to the platform by XSP made the renewal “a straightforward decision.” Once the new functionality is added, Markit will be able to provide index calculations at the individual portfolio level, applying custom rules to each portfolio’s handling of corporate actions data to ensure accuracy and to provide checks and validations in the event of conflicting data.
The Headline Indices functionality will allow Markit’s core data team in London to prioritise and filter their workload in order to enhance service levels they are able to provide internally to their index management business groups. The downstream benefit to the index management business groups will be the ease with which they will be able to interrogate their own bespoke universe of securities.
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