XSP is extending the market reach of its automated corporate actions solution through a deal with technology services provider Broadridge Financial Solutions and a cloud-based version of its software.
Under the terms of the Broadridge deal, Broadridge will offer XSP v5 as an integral element of its hosted applications service provider platform, as a service bureau solution and as a standalone product. Existing users of Broadridge back-office applications will be able to interface XSP v5 to the company’s hosted Brokerage Processing Services, Impact fixed income processing service and Gloss international securities processing service.
Claiming that partner agreements augment and do not detract from XSP’s direct sales of v5 – the company has 60 direct customers in 100 locations – Brendan Farrell, CEO at XSP, explains: “Broadridge is a leader in the broker/dealer space and many clients rely on it for many things so it made sense that they could rely on it for corporate actions too.
“Broadridge had an in-house built corporate actions solution, but it came to us as it wanted something more robust and richer in functionality. It wanted unlimited access to corporate actions data vendors and a solution that supports Swift connectivity compliance, offers a slick notification system and can deliver information to mobile devices. The partnership is a good blend of Broadridge’s crossing engines and our corporate actions solution.”
Broadridge is deploying the XSP platform at its data centres in readiness to offer a turnkey corporate actions solution to clients within the next few months. XSP v5 includes interfaces to over 30 data vendors and is expected to help Broadridge users maximise operational efficiency and straight through processing of corporate actions.
Broadridge is certainly not XSP’s first partner in the broker/dealer market, but it is its largest and joins partners covering other market sectors such as SunGard that hosts XSP for the banking sector.
On its own account, XSP introduced a cloud-based software-as-a-service version of the v5 platform towards the end of 2011. Users can pay as they go and XSP can quickly develop and deploy additional functionality to the corporate actions software. The company is using Tier 3 to host the cloud solution and says it offers the advantage of being dedicated to the issues of hosting, in the same way that XSP, unlike competitors including Tata, Information Mosaic and SmartStream, is dedicated only to corporate actions automation.
“This is the most exciting the business has ever been,” says Farrell. “Firms with in-house solutions can’t keep up with the growing volume of corporate actions data and the complexity of investments so are looking at vendor solutions. We are running faster and faster in terms of taking on customers and with the cloud we can deliver solutions to any organisation of any size, anywhere. This changes my market.”
