The testing of the available ISO 15022 event types – which cover thousands of events – via the XSP interface was undertaken by FT Interactive Data and Xcitek throughout January 2006 prior to the latest release of FT Interactive Data’s ISO 15022 service. A significant benefit of this approach is that the time a client spends on testing FT Interactive Data’s inbound feed – when the combination of data and software are installed at a customer site – should be reduced.

FT Interactive Data, a provider of corporate action event data for over 30 years, has a wealth of experience in gathering, updating, validating and delivering corporate actions data to financial institutions. Its comprehensive corporate action information available in ISO 15022 format includes rights issues, bonus issues, mergers and acquisitions, and redemptions. FT Interactive Data made available the first release of its ISO 15022 based corporate actions service in the summer of 2004. Today, its current release covers the majority of the 67 event types that deal with corporate actions content. Upon initial release, this service was available for FTP over the internet; in September 2005, FT Interactive Data announced that its service is now also available via SWIFTNet.

Awarded the SWIFTReady Corporate Actions Label, XSP features comprehensive data capture from multiple vendor sources, custodians, prime brokers and agent banks; rules-based scrubbing tools; a robust workflow management module and complete entitlement processing. Using client defined queues and user views, tasks and exceptions are automatically routed to the appropriate designated parties for the required action. XSP delivers the functionality to manage client event notifications and election responses through both its ISO module and its web-based component, eTRAN. Using these tools, instructions are automatically captured and updated to the back-end systems for reconciliation and entitlement processing.

Nat Sey, FT Interactive Data Europe’s manager of infrastructure and delivery, said: "We have been working with Xcitek for the past couple of years to smooth out the implementation of the various releases of our ISO 15022 corporate actions service. Over the past few months, we have tested many new aspects of this latest release, which was particularly comprehensive. As a result, I would expect to see significantly reduced implementation cycles at customer sites and am confident that this should provide added value for the customer."

Adrian Gray, Xcitek’s senior business analyst for Europe, commented: "During testing of the FT Interactive Data vendor feed, we were pleased to see that the principles set out by the Market Data Provider User Group were adhered to. We successfully mapped and processed the received data into XSP without any modifications or enhancements required by either party."

Neil Sheppard, Xcitek’s chief operating officer of XSP Europe, added: "The benefits of automating corporate actions processing with Xcitek’s XSP solution are further enhanced by our latest offering of FT Interactive Data’s vendor feed in the ISO 15022 format. We have a long-standing relationship with FT Interactive Data and look forward to continue working closely with them to implement our complementary services at global client sites."