London-based Trace Financial has launched a corporate actions workflow tool, Cams, configurable for the needs of custodians, fund managers and brokers.
Designed to eliminate delays and errors within the corporate action life cycle, Cams highlights problems for resolution in a real-time environment and notifies relevant systems and personnel by a process of alerts.
The integration layer of Cams provides real-time connectivity to external databases, extracting information that can be routed to any internal system, under bespoke rules defined by the user, says Trace. The system can be wired into market data feeds and used to update other internal portfolio and trading systems, as well as link to communication networks like Swift or the Internet, to ensure timely settlement.
Work requiring manual intervention (e.g. optional elections) is routed within the organisation to the owner of the work and appears at the user’s desktop system in an in-basket. Changes and updates of work items are fully logged in an audit file and can be tracked and reported upon.
Trace says the system is a major advance on other more traditional, passive, data processing systems, which generate long batch oriented reports, which are then used to manually check for errors.