Vermeg, the global securities processing software specialist, announced today that Absa Capital Investor Services ( ACIS ), the securities arm of Absa Bank Ltd, one of South Africa's largest financial services organisations and member of the Barclays group, has selected Vermeg's award-winning, SwiftReady Gold Labelled, securities processing platform Megara, to ensure superior delivery of services to its custody clients.
ACIS through Absa Capital and its affiliation with Barclays Capital, provides clients with both local and international expertise. Its business model is supported by products and services that match the increasingly sophisticated demands of the market with access to pioneering technology and product expertise.
Further to an extensive market review, ACIS decided to implement Megara not only to support its growth but also to improve its comprehensive custodial, clearing, settlement and value-added services to clients.
"Megara is one of the most sought-after software systems internationally and will help us to ensure the best service delivery to our clients" says Bennie van der Westhuizen, Head of Custody.
He added: "Megara offers a host of benefits. It is an internationally recognised system, it offers cutting edge custody technology and extensive opportunity to integrate between Absa Capital and clients. Additionally, the system will allow us to deal on a Straight-Through Processing basis for all type of asset classes. We have been particularly impressed by the architecture of Megara® founded on JEE and SOA oriented that provides us with a high level of agility to support the fast changing business environment."
Christian Cure, VERMEG's EVP Sales added: "We are delighted that ACIS has decided to join the growing list of custodians adopting Megara to further enhance their custody services. VERMEG has been present in the South African market for many years and we have a deep understanding of local market requirements and practices. The web-enabled nature of the Megara suite means ACIS will be able to provide its clients with an automated way of conveying their securities instructions to ACIS, vastly improving the degree of straight through processing and minimising operational risk".