XSP and City Networks Partner for Corporate Actions and Reconciliations Solution

City Networks has signed a partnership agreement with XSP to offer an integrated corporate actions, reconciliation and exception management solution. Under the new agreement, both City Networks and XSP will provide an integrated corporate actions and reconciliation solution to the financial market.

The offering combines City Networks’ Proactive range of exception management, business process management and real time KPI and KRI functionality and version 5 of XSP’s global corporate actions platform. Marcus Dutton, product strategy director at City Networks, explains the rationale behind their choice of XSP: “We recognised that corporate actions processing is still a manual process in many organisations and reliable reconciliation underpins the entire corporate actions process. So we were particularly looking to partner with a best of breed corporate actions solution supplier and XSP is the market leader with the largest installed base.” Brendan Farrell, CEO at XSP, says the vendor has been in discussions with City Networks for the past year. “Both of our product offerings – XSP v5 Corporate Actions platform and City Networks’ Proactive suite – are built on a common technology platform utilising a service-oriented architecture (SOA),” he says. Daniel Retzer, managing director and chief technology officer at XSP, adds: “SOA, which was once primarily held as an integration technique for enterprises to connect disparate systems, has moved beyond the enterprise and into the vendor space. Adoption of SOA among financial services solutions provides vendors of complementary products a common platform to present compelling solutions to a wide range of business needs. XSP’s partnership with City Networks is an example of SOA facilitating the creation of a robust solution featuring the core competencies of two complementary product offerings.” Farrell hopes that the partnership will allow the vendors’ mutual clients to realise increased levels of straight-through processing, improved operational efficiencies, better client services, reduced risks and costs, regulatory compliant controls and an immediate return on investment. The integration of the vendors’ respective products was not a challenge, adds Farrell, due the modular nature of both their offerings. “As each client’s requirements are unique, XSP and City Networks collaborate together to ensure successful implementations,” he says. Dutton adds: “Part of the due diligence in establishing this partnership was to validate the ease of integration from a technology perspective. Having done that, we are now confident that our combined offering will be simple and fast to implement.” Richard Hill, City Networks’ CEO, says: “It offers the market a complete and integrated solution for automating the processing, reconciliation and managing exceptions arising from corporate actions.” Dutton concludes: “Clients will be offered for the first time an integrated solution to manage their corporate actions more efficiently, with extensive case management capabilities to a granular level as well as the ability to view real time key performance and risk indicators from across their enterprise.”