Smartstream Technologies
Nimbler Reference Data Utility

The recent financial crisis has highlighted financial institutions’ under investment in the middle and back-office. This has resulted in ineffective operational controls, inflexible systems and the inability to respond to the economic downturn and these inefficiencies have been magnified by increasing transaction complexity and fluctuating volumes, costing market participants around US$18 billion per annum. This is where Haytham Kaddoura –led SmartStream Technologies comes into play. SmartStream addresses the challenges faced by financial institutions through solutions that cover the entire post-trade lifecycle enabling more efficient, streamlined and cost-effective middle and back office operations. As a global software and managed services provider, SmartStream, in challenging markets conditions, has outpaced its rivals in the financial markets sector, creating an impressive base of more than 1,500 customers. At the heart of this success is the ability to react to client, market and regulatory changes through innovative solutions. That is why, even in challenging market conditions, the company continues to invest more than 20 percent of revenue back into research and development.

SmartStream’s practice of listening to clients has definitely given it an edge over its competitors today. “Unlike other vendors that offer ‘made to measure’ solutions in the marketplace, SmartStream has always remained unique in allowing its customers to form and shape the solution according to their requirements,” says Kaddoura. For instance, when Raiffeisen Bank International (RBI), an Austrian banking group, decided to take a proactive approach to combat the impact of The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision’s release—‘Principles for Sound Liquidity Risk Management and Supervision,’ SmartStream was their choice of vendor. The bank chose SmartStream’s cash and liquidity reporting solution, a solution that resulted from the collaboration between SmartStream’s product development team in Vienna and the bank’s treasury domain experts.

The solution, Corona Cash and Liquidity, provides best practices for its customers and offers real-time data from external sources. With this solution, RBI was provided with a centralized view of all cash positions throughout the bank, aiding cash management, forecasting, and trading needs. Also, the solution successfully generated complete reports incorporating central bank deposits— enabling the client to allocate funds and to feed details into these reports.

SmartStream understands that as the ecosystem of local and international regulations is constantly changing, banks are striving to adhere to these restrictions while still focusing on optimizing their processes, control their costs, and most importantly, keep their stakeholders satisfied.

SmartStream’s Corona is one of the company’s answers to increasing straight-through processing rates whilst fulfilling reporting and compliance needs. An example would be the Corona family of solutions which are made scalable so they can handle millions of transactions per day, whether the chosen solution is hosted on-premise or managed in the cloud. Additionally, its shorter implementation time ensures minimum disruption of the organization’s daily operations.

A recent proof of Corona’s growing demand is its implementation by “IT Solutions Austria,” the Austrian IT service provider for Erste Group, one of the largest financial services providers in Central and Eastern Europe. The client is confident the solution will help reduce the operational cost since its deployment requires minimal investment, time and effort and is proven to reduce user traffic related costs by as much as 40-60 percent, depending on the individual organization’s mainframe contracts.

A reliable ‘partner of choice’ for some of the major banks across the globe today, SmartStream has traversed a journey of rapid organic growth and made a number of strategic acquisitions as well.

Recently, in collaboration with Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley, SmartStream created the SmartStream Reference Data Utility, originally known as Securities Product Reference Data (SPReD).

Established as the first industry utility based on the principles of market commonality, collaboration, and contribution, SmartStream’s RDU is a shared service model. It manages data holistically across legal entity, security, instrument, corporate action, and pricing details, promoting common fixes to data processing across the instrument lifecycle and the events that originate and change data.

The RDU manages the complete data workflow, from sourcing and validation to enrichment and cross-referencing of information. The service utilizes SmartStream’s proven, market-leading data management service and is unique in its ability to offer multi-tenant architecture, full auditing capabilities, and customer-defined sourcing. “Cleansing best practices, which are applied, continually evolve through the network effect of data processing mutualization to achieve the highest possible data quality and timeliness. This approach guarantees that the client’s data is fit-for-purpose and consistent,” says Kaddoura.

This neoteric notion of reference data as a utility substantiates the fact that SmartStream is constantly growing and evolving its solutions to meet the needs of the complex modern financial markets. By facilitating the achievement of processing mutualization, reduction in operational risk, and heightened service quality within the reference data management space, SmartStream’s RDU has truly positioned itself as the frontrunner in the industry.

Presently, with more than 21 global offices, SmartStream has outpaced its competitors in the financial markets by a wide margin. “I am incredibly proud of all that has been accomplished at SmartStream over the last several years and look forward to continue positioning the company at the forefront of the industry,” added Kaddoura. Their ability to react to client, market, and regulatory changes through innovative solutions has earned SmartStream more than 70 of the world’s top 100 banks alongside the world’s leading asset managers, custodians, and broker dealers. The company is planning to further its investment in technology by expanding its operations in Poland.