The new service enables companies to integrate these critical events into their systems and models to better manage risk and make faster, more informed asset management decisions.

Globalization and the credit crisis are increasingly driving the need for companies to automate the management of corporate actions. Portfolios today often hold securities from across the globe and each exchange uses a different standard and requirement for capturing corporate actions data, increasing the volume and complexity of the data that asset managers must track. At the same time, the credit crisis has forced companies to restructure, dramatically increasing the number of events and actions.

Failure to analyze the full impact of corporate actions can lead to costly mistakes when making critical investment decisions. However, many companies still rely on manual processes to obtain and manage corporate actions data due to the cost and complexity of automation, exposing them to risks and time delays in decision making. For the first time, XigniteCorporateActions delivers corporate actions data as an on-demand Web service, making it easier, faster and more cost-effective than ever before to automate corporate actions data management.

As an on-demand Web service, XigniteCorporateActions enables companies to instantly integrate this time-sensitive data into their own applications without the need for any further investment in software or hardware infrastructure. Alternative solutions require companies to load and manage their own databases from data feeds or batch files, which leads to costly and time-consuming investments in software, hardware, and scarce-skilled staff. With Xignite's Web services approach, applications can instantly and directly access corporate actions data without the need for managing an on-site database.

XigniteCorporateActions dramatically accelerates the process of developing corporate actions automation by offering companies application-ready data instead of large flat files requiring extensive in-house data management. At kaChing, the Web's largest marketplace for investing talent, where more than 370,000 member portfolios are currently managed, the engineering team selected XigniteCorporateActions to accelerate development of their corporate actions automation.

"kaChing's investing talent marketplace requires an extremely high level of financial data integrity," said Andy Rachleff, kaChing's chairman. "Our site would not be feasible without services like XigniteCorporateActions. Once again Xignite has allowed us to differentiate our service by providing information that was not previously available in a form that allows our developers to iterate rapidly."

"Demand for corporate actions data automation is reaching a fever pitch due to globalization and the fall out of the economic crisis," said Stephane Dubois, CEO, Xignite. "Using Web services, XigniteCorporateActions takes the expense and pain out of integrating it into applications, enabling companies to easily automate corporate actions data management and empowering asset managers to make faster, better informed decisions."