Operations Briefs

SIS SegaInterSettle offers a new corporate-actions service to the securities industry: Corporate Actions Enhanced Services (CAES) is the name of the new application for central and process-oriented administration of corporate events. With Web-based CAES, the information flow is provided in realtime and, to a great extent, fully automated. According to SIS, this makes redundant the laborious collection, validation and completion of data involving a large amount of paperwork.

The latest version of the FIX Protocol could lead to industry savings in excess of $100 million annually on confirmation processing alone, according to new research commissioned from CityIQ by Solution Forge. Already considered the de-facto industry standard for pre-trade processing between fund managers and brokers, the protocol has been significantly enhanced to cover post-trade processing in version 4.4, released in April 2003. The research has identified that the new facilities will enable many firms to switch their processing from utility providers such as Omgeo, with savings at average firms likely to be in the region of $125,000 annually, with larger firms able to realize considerably greater savings.

Tullett Liberty, one of the world's leading inter-dealer brokers, announced the launch of Post:marker, a straight-through-processing application to enhance post-trade notifications. The product was created in response to client demand, and will be available to Tullett Liberty counterparties from June 2003. It is currently in beta testing with a group of core liquidity providers in London and New York.

SunGard Securities Processing, an operating group of SunGard, announced that it has completed an interface linking its Phase3 securities-processing solution with Trustar Retirement Services. The interface eliminates manual processes and enables automatic, electronic reporting of investors' IRA information from Phase3, which manages the firm's account and position books and records, to Trustar, which handles record-keeping and plan administration.