Loomis, Sayles & Company Sign New 5-year Agreement for T-Scape’s Corporate Action Solution iActs

  • Asset Management
  • 11.01.2023 09:45 am

Financial technology company T-Scape today announced that Loomis,  Sayles & Company has signed a new 5-year agreement for its corporate action solution iActs. It coincides with another of T-Scape’s clients, Western Asset Management, also signing a new 5-year deal.  

The new agreement marks a continuation of a story that got going in 2016 when T-Scape implemented the very first version of iActs, to augment an incumbent solution and allow front-office traders, portfolio managers, and others, to view and elect upon voluntary corporate actions. 

Commenting on the new agreement, Steve Chittenden, Director of Investment Operations at Loomis Sayles said, ‘This new deal continues what has been a highly successful relationship. It started with iActs opening a window through which our front office could interact with the corporate action operations team in a far more efficient manner. This initial success triggered the development of a successor version of iActs, to which we could migrate our remaining corporate action processes and retire our previous system. With a new deal in place, we can continue to  reap the many benefits iActs affords us.’ 

T-Scape’s Managing Director David Baxter continues, ‘we are absolutely delighted to have agreed on a new deal with  Loomis Sayles, our longest established client. Being the first to implement iActs you might have thought it was a  major leap of faith on their part, especially when the easier decision may have been to select a more mature legacy product. This new deal signifies it was the right call back then, and we are immensely proud that Loomis Sayles continues to trust in our abilities to deliver first-class solutions and the services that surround them.’ 

As assets under management have grown at Loomis Sayles over the past five years, so have processing volumes, due in part to the assimilation of other affiliated businesses under the Natixis umbrella. Loomis Sayles has more than 100 geographically dispersed front-office staff and a corporate action operations team of 6 interacting with iActs daily.  The front office takes responsibility for providing elections whilst the operations team manage the process from start to finish. With iActs in place, the corporate action operations team has been able to absorb the additional load. 

Attention is currently directed towards the further integration of iActs via the upload of calculated entitlements according to options elected/mandated, for ingestion by Loomis Sayles’ internal accounting system. Updating account positions automatically will further reduce manual routines and bring a greater level of control, auditability and completeness to the process. 

Product Director at T-Scape, Paul FitzGerald, explains, ‘We’re used to pulling and pushing data between iActs and internal systems and this is an extension of that. In this specific case, we’re looking to deliver corporate action outcomes as postings to update internal books and records. It closes the loop on the front-to-back corporate action process. Interestingly another of our clients is looking to do something similar using the same functionality but, in this instance, to determine whether the calculated outcomes adhere to compliance rules prior to elections being made and instructions sent. The same process, but at a different stage in the lifetime of corporate action. The key  in both cases is ensuring users are able to adjust key fields upon which the outcomes are calculated, so that the user  has total control over the process.’ 

Baxter concludes, ‘We’re entering another really exciting stage at T-Scape. We’ve added some fantastic people to the T-Scape team with thoughts about how we can significantly improve upon what’s already there. We are also working with some of the best names in the wealth and asset management world and, through the feedback loop that is our innovation sessions, all will continue to play a crucial role in how iActs evolves. The next stage in that evolution will be the move to iActs version 3. It’s going to be more an evolutionary leap than a step as we will be bringing many of the of the ideas, inside and outside of corporate actions, that have been generated over the past few years into it. Suffice to say we think iActs v3 will be very, very special.’ 

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