Sparinvest Chooses SunGard’s XSPrisa for Corporate Actions Processing

Sparinvest, a Luxembourg-based international asset management firm with offices in France, Sweden and Denmark, plans to implement XSPrisa, the managed service offering from SunGard XSP, officials have told Inside Reference Data.

XSPrisa automates the expensive and challenging workflow of corporate actions processing, according to Brendan Farrell, New York-based executive vice president and general manager of SunGard's XSP business. "Our offering facilitates [firms] having access to the XSP software without having to actually deploy the software in-house," he says. "And it's all accessible through the cloud."

The implementation of XSPrisa will help Sparinvest mitigate operational risk and increase client service levels and scalability to efficiently process the growing volume and complexity of events, SunGard officials said this week.

Corporate actions processing is "one of the last frontiers of automation", says Farrell, because corporate actions themselves are not standardized or regulated or controlled. Firms globally show varying degrees of corporate actions automation, with most still supplementing the process using manual interventions. "But what we're seeing today is more and more companies coming back to firms like ours and saying, can you help us with this process, can you take some of this off our hands?" says Farrell.

The complexity of corporate actions data can expose a firm to large costs and risk, and the corporate actions department is under the same scrutiny as the rest of the industry, says Farrell. "They're being forced to decrease their costs and are continuously under pressure to provide a faster, better and more technologically savvy service."

"What's interesting about the XSPrisa offering for a firm like Sparinvest is that ... about a decade ago, this was usually an area that would be built internally by huge banks on large-scale systems at tremendous expense. Now, we can offer this to the entire industry, and more and more firms are automating their corporate actions by using solutions like ours," Farrell concludes.