Boston-based asset manager MFS Investment Management has become the first US client for eVent, a corporate actions processing tool from messaging specialist HelioGraph.
Martin Pearce, SVP head of investment operations at MFS says the tool bridges a major gap in industry straight-through processing initiatives. "Industry groups such as Isitc and the Securities Market Practice Group as well as the European CSD's have spent considerable time working on the new ISO15022 data dictionary messages for corporate actions. These messages are, however, of little use to the asset management community, or indeed the marketplace generally, unless systems are in place to interpret the data and present details of each corporate action in human readable form. This interpretation tied with subsequent matching and corporate action workflow processing has, until the arrival of eVent, been impossible to automate."
The Heliograph software is being marketed by eVent Systems, a company set up to promote and distribute the product worldwide. David Baxter, eVent Systems co-founder, comments: "The reason fund managers have not been more forceful in pressing custodians for the new standard is that whilst these messages are wonderfully constructed for interpretation by computers, to the poor corporate action clerk they are largely indecipherable."
He says a key feature of eVent is its ability to translate the data into user-readable form allowing users to quickly identify corporate action details for onward processing.