"In today's demanding environment, reducing costs and minimising exposure to risk continue to be top priorities for financial institutions," said Trevor Fromant, Global Head, Banking and STP Solutions, COR-FS. "Technology continues to play an integral role in meeting these demands and the Salerio EST module has been designed with these priorities in mind."

The new module enables asset managers to complete the automation of the security transaction lifecycle by electronically receiving settlement notification and confirmation messages from their custodians and linking them to the original trade details.

Salerio EST reflects the actions of the custodians and brokers to give users a complete view of settlement activity, enabling them to deal with issues before they become settlement failures and ultimately recording when full settlement has occurred. Settlement issues are prioritised in the workflow - this is useful when dealing with high-risk markets or sensitive portfolios and ensures time is spent investigating those requiring the most urgent attention.

"Many organisations still have manual processes and focus on dealing with trades that have already failed," said Fromant. "Taking a proactive approach to dealing with settlement issues minimises the financial costs associated with failed trade interest claims and reduces the overall risk of settlement failures."

The module also helps asset managers ensure trades are settled correctly by linking confirmed settlement amounts received from the custodian to the original transactions as well as raising warnings when partial settlement has occurred.

"We have worked closely with our clients to understand their current processes and have designed the new Salerio module to provide an early warning system for potential settlement failures. This will help firms to significantly reduce the number of trade failures and is a major step towards preventing them entirely," added Simon Bacon, Lead Analyst for the Salerio EST project.

The Salerio EST module supports a number of methods for retrieving settlement activity information. Salerio imports standard SWIFT MT544-8 notification and confirmation messages. Where SWIFT messages cannot be received, settlement activity information can either be captured manually or imported through a standard Comma Separated Value (CSV) file interface - this also means that existing failed trade reports can be managed through Salerio EST.

Salerio EST provides a comprehensive data store of all trade settlement activity. These metrics can be used to create custom trade-fail reports and to track custodian and/or broker performance. Accounting records and other interested parties are also kept up-to-date by posting updates following confirmation of settlement.

The Salerio EST module can link to any trade delivery system. It can be installed as a standalone system or as a fully integrated solution along with other Salerio modules.

Salerio provides a complete, post-trade management solution for securities and treasury instruments as well as a range of over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives. Delivered as a comprehensive, feature-rich, pre-packaged solution, Salerio offers clients market leading implementation times.

COR-FS has been successful in delivering Salerio solutions to many of the leading asset managers across the globe and possesses unparalleled experience in meeting post-trade processing requirements. The launch of Salerio EST is part of an ongoing investment programme that has seen a number of other modules developed during the last year.