CheckFree Wins Multiple Gold Awards in New CityCompass Corporate Actions Benchmark Report
Wednesday September 15, 9:15 am ET
LONDON and ATLANTA, Sept. 15 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- CheckFree Software, a division of CheckFree Corporation (Nasdaq: CKFR - News), today announced that its advanced Corporate Actions solution, CheckFree eVent(TM), has just achieved several gold accreditations in the new corporate actions (CA) report: Benchmarking of International Systems and Services (BISS) (1). The report was commissioned by CityCompass, an independent financial services consultant, and prepared by Andrew Chilcott, a senior analyst at Bloor Research, assisted by a panel representing a cross-section of securities practitioners including BNP Paribas SS, UBS, Dresdner Kleinwort, Baring AM, HSBC and others.
The CityCompass BISS report has been broadly divided into three categories: CA systems for Asset Managers, Broker/Dealers and Custodians. CheckFree won a gold label accreditation in the two areas considered to be the most challenging to implement - Broker/Dealers and Custodians.
According to the report, CheckFree scored well in meeting the needs of business requirements, in the richness of its technical functionality and in system maturity. The report also recognises that CheckFree has not only achieved SWIFTReady label status for Corporate Actions, but has the additional ability to generate payment messages. It cites CheckFree as having excelled in several key areas. Says Andrew Chilcott: "CheckFree stood head and shoulders above all the others in providing a step by step, date by date demonstration of every trigger and task undertaken in processing the four events. If I had been a customer, I would have been suitably impressed by the ease of configuration, the transparency of the processing and the care that had been taken to make the demonstration specific to me as a potential customer. I must commend CheckFree on their achievement and setting a standard that other vendors would do well to follow."
CheckFree is also the only solution cited in the report that was able to openly identify the problem of bonds with attached coupons that do not get announced - an important feature of calculating fixed interest entitlements. When it came to issuing confirmations via the Web, CheckFree was mentioned as having a 'notably good solution.' It was further mentioned that the addition of a web-browser makes widespread deployment and system management much easier. Overall, the report confirms that CheckFree always scores highly when the quality of systems and its architecture are taken into account.
Amery Thomas, senior vice president of International Operations for CheckFree Software, said: "We are honored to have been so well reviewed in a report that carries the weight of such prestigious industry experts as Andrew Chilcott and CityCompass. These findings reflect and reward the progress we have made in the latest release of CheckFree eVent and the hard work of a broad team of experts here who have produced a truly end-to-end solution that delivers a low risk 'out of the box' deployment in corporate actions, the most complex of financial software environments."
CheckFree eVent is a next generation corporate actions automation workflow and exception management suite and one of only two CA solutions to have achieved SWIFTReady CA accreditation. Developed by HelioGraph Ltd., which is now part of CheckFree Software, eVent offers a rules-based design with a large library of extensively pre-tested templates and supports SWIFT and other major standards, leveraging an inherently integrated architecture to provide truly global straight through processing (STP) capabilities. . .
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