This client is an established Swiss Private Bank institution specialized in Private Wealth and Asset Management, and represented worldwide at more than 25 locations in Switzerland, Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America.
As part of a strategic initiative to reduce manual overhead and increase data quality, the client identified a need for streamlining the Corporate Actions process before entitlement calculations in Avaloq. At the firm, as well as many other buy-side companies, the capture of the announcement from custodians via SWIFT as well as from data vendors is the first step and at the same time often the weakest link in securing quality of the overall corporate actions process.
“The current situation on the financial markets and the increasing volumes of data prompt all banks to reconsider their processes in the operations departments. Manual data handling is a cost-intensive and error-prone activity that increases the operational risk”, says the Head of Logistics and Member of the Executive Committee. “The automatic capture, cleansing and scrubbing of Corporate Actions announcements is a good example of measures that can bring considerable quality and cost advantages to back-office operations.”
The Head of Corporate Actions at this Private Bank confirms a strong business case behind investing in corporate actions automation: “A sharp increase of volumes as well as a higher complexity of cash flows and corporate actions has led us to the decision to improve our process with high priority. This is aligned with ongoing efficiency considerations in our back-office.”
AIM Software* was selected by this Swiss Private Bank following an extensive selection process against incumbent providers for a number of important reasons.
“AIM Software convinced us with the clear focus of the solution towards the integration into an already existing environment,” continues the Head of Logistics. “Avaloq is our main system for the core banking operations. The solution GAIN from AIM Software fits perfectly into this picture and comes with an already available best practice approach for the main software features such as VDF loading, matching and Avaloq interfacing.”
The Chief Operating Officer of the Private Bank summarizes: “Based on a three months product due diligence, AIM Software’s product GAIN resulted to be the most modern and flexible on the market while providing a comprehensive set of out of the box functionalities. We particularly liked the strong know how of AIM Software in the area of reference data feeds used to enrich, compare and amend the data coming from our custodians with relevant tax and accounting data. In addition AIM’s deep understanding of the downstream processes within our core banking solution Avaloq has further allowed us to increase the level of overall STP, which we could not have achieved easily with other solutions on the market.”
AIM Software’s product GAIN resulted to be the most modern and flexible on the market while providing a comprehensive set of out of the box functionalities.Chief Operating Officer at Leading Swiss Private Bank
In a first phase of the project, the high-volume mandatory events such as Dividend Cash, Interest Payments and Redemptions will be automated in order to realize a fast return. These mandatory events represent more than 60% of the overall volumes processed by the client. Further phases of the project have extended the coverage of event types fully automated by the solution, allowing it to reach up to 90% for high volume events. This has drastically reduced the manual work needed for booking a corporate action, allowing our business users to focus on more complex events and better quality.
*As of August 1, 2019, SimCorp acquired AIM Software. The GAIN platform is now SimCorp Gain.
