SmartStream
Helping Banks Achieve Rapid ROI and Lower TCO

The banking landscape is restructuring at a very fast pace, adding undue pressure on scores of financial institutions for the capital requirements. Further, banks need to create a new level of efficiency and build infrastructure systems and solutions that comply with the new regulations. “These factors, along with the numerous new regulations are putting pressure on banks to get a better view into their monetary systems,” says Philippe Chambadal, CEO of SmartStream. Headquartered in London, UK, SmartStream helps banks tackle these issues by providing Transaction Lifecycle Management (TLM) solutions and Managed Services that dramatically transform the middle and back-office operations of financial institutions.

According to Chambadal, the recent monetary catastrophe has painted financial institutions’ under-investments in post-trade processing. This has resulted in weak operational controls, inflexible systems, and the inability to counter the fiscals lump. These inadequacies have been magnified by growing transaction intricacy and fluctuating volumes; costing market participants around $50 billion dollars per annum. Through its solutions, SmartStream covers the entire post-trade lifecycle, enabling more efficient, streamlined and cost-effective middle and back office operations. Furthermore, the company ties reference data management with post-trade processes to increase straight-through processing rates.

SmartStream delivers better automation and control to critical post trade operations including cash, liquidity management and collateral management solutions, reference data operations, and corporate actions processing. These solutions enable banks to break down organizational silos with a single enterprise-wide solution for cash management, treasury management, exceptions management and trade reconciliations. It creates a global, real-time view of all money movements, cash and liquidity positions, to support optimal investment and lending opportunities.

SmartStream’s TLM Client Money Segregation solution delivers a unique enterprise-wide process to automate the Client Money and Assets segregation process and provide all the key information for the client money and asset return (CMAR).

We deliver significant value to firms, ensuring a rapid ROI and lowering their TCO

TLM is SmartStream’s trademarked approach to solving operational processing challenges by understanding the end-to-end transaction flow—from trade inception to settlement. TLM solutions do not force the replacement of legacy systems; instead they leverage core capabilities and protect clients’ investments, retiring only those areas of weakness whilst integrating and adding to existing processing capabilities.

Recently, SmartStream Technologies acquired assets related to software, sales and support of IBM’s Algorithmics collateral solution. This is a strategic deal to enhance SmartStream’s existing suite of solutions, which enables financial organizations to automate the end-to-end post trade lifecycle, decreasing costs and risk. The Algorithmics collateral solution, now rebranded as TLM Collateral Management, has an established position in the financial services industry, offering collateral lifecycle automation for buy-and sell-side institutions, custodians and asset servicers.

“As a result, our solutions are critical to the retooling of post-trade environments demanded by new regulations—whether it is liquidity transparency, visibility into OTC derivatives positions, removing operational risk or moving operations to true intra-day transaction processing,” says Chambadal. SmartStream’s approach to creating, delivering and supporting a range of industry leading solutions deliver significant value to firms, ensure a rapid ROI and lower their TCO. “This enables us to outperform our competition during the financial crisis, sustaining our market leadership whilst securing flagship customers for new products and services,” he adds.

Going forward, the company wants to expand its shared service model. “We are constantly investing in creating multi-tenanted, and highly scalable solutions for financial institutions to better control their transaction flow at a lower unit processing cost,” concludes Chambadal.