Accurate Software has been awarded a contract by recently listed Canaccord Capital Corporation (CCI: TSX), Canada's largest independent full service investment dealer, to deploy Accurate's Operational Risk Management solution, Accurate NXG. Canaccord Capital is licensing the solution to improve the automation of its reconciliation and exception management processes, for cash and securities at its Toronto and Vancouver operations.
Canaccord Capital will use the reconciliation and exception management components of Accurate NXG to streamline and simplify the processing of listed, OTC and Option trades, cash, fees and commissions associated with its domestic and cross-border business. Canaccord is also deploying Accurate's business intelligence Dashboard technology to improve the company's management reporting.
The strength of Accurate NXG's matching functionality for one-to-many and many to-many item reconciliation directly supports the full netting trading practices found in this environment. Accurate NXG delivers an enterprise-wide operational control framework that will help Canaccord Capital to improve efficiency and reduce costs in its reconciliations processes.
Canaccord Capital provides a full range of brokerage services to its client base and therefore Accurate NXG will also be used to help automate position reconciliations associated with the company's custodian relationships as well as with the fund companies associated with their mutual fund activities. In addition, Canaccord will use Accurate NXG to process the reconciliation of their GIC (Guaranteed Investment Certificate) activity on positions held on a NCI (non-certificate issue) basis with 35 financial institutions.
"We required a robust transaction management solution that could automate and centralise the processing of our cash and securities reconciliations and reduce the associated exposure to risk," said Peter Virvilis, executive vice president, at Canaccord Capital Corporation. "Using Accurate NXG as the foundation for a flexible and scalable enterprise-wide solution, we plan to standardise our reconciliation and exception management processes across all of our business areas, as our business volumes increase.
"We selected Accurate because they were able to demonstrate a clear understanding of our business requirements, and provide a proven technology solution on a platform that would scale to support our future growth and success."
Using Accurate NXG, Canaccord Capital's operations staff will be able to focus on the handling and minimising of exceptions that are more complex. Back office operations staff will streamline reconciliation processing and exception handling, so that notification and correction of issues can occur prior to market open each day. The solution will provide the management team with key risk analysis and management reporting.
Phase one of the implementation will focus on improving automation of processes at the company's operations in Vancouver and Toronto. Once business processes have been defined and improved in phase one, the second phase will focus on automating those processes further with the rollout of Accurate NXG's workflow component. Also planned for the future is the externalizing of the solution's capabilities via Dashboard, to Canaccord Capital's corporate customers.
"Increasingly investment dealers and other financial services institutions are discovering the benefits of an integrated, enterprise-wide solution for back-office automation, managing operational risk and regulatory compliance," said Gary Gibbs, executive vice president for North America at Accurate Software. "This partnership between Accurate and Canaccord extends Accurate's position as a leading technology provider for the Canadian financial services sector.
"Our team of professional consultants worked closely to establish a thorough understanding of the issues facing Canaccord Capital and worked in partnership with the operations team to ensure that the implementation could meet their exact requirements, now and in the future."
The implementation, which began in August 2004, is expected to go live in early 2005. Accurate NXG replaces several legacy systems and manual processes.