SmartStream releases Corona 7.0

Corona 7.0 is the biggest release ever produced by the company and delivers both major functional and technical developments, demonstrating the company's commitment to providing an integrated approach to transaction lifecycle management.

Commenting on the delivery, Wolfgang Prinz, Corona Product Manager, stated "We are confident that the wealth of new functionality combined with the products proven track record will be compelling to new and existing customers alike. Corona 7.0 continues to deliver unrivalled matching rates as well as automated exception management to help users reduce risk and gain greater control over their transaction lifecycles."

Corona 7.0 includes enhancements to Corona Cash, Corona Securities, Corona Confirmations and Corona Intra-day for the reconciliation of accounts, securities, forex, money market and derivative messages as well as cash messages. The enhanced solution includes the sophisticated Corona Investigations, which automates the processing of exceptions and Corona Active, the system-wide risk management monitor. Completely new functionality delivered with version 7.0 includes Corona Generic, Corona Corporate Actions and Corona WebConnect. Corona 7.0 also offers new and existing customers an Enterprise Edition. Especially designed for banks with high transaction volumes and comprehensive functional requirements Corona Enterprise Edition optimises server resources and enables system administrators to use common tools for monitoring and controlling processes.

Corona Generic, delivered in Corona 7.0, provides an "Anything to anything" capability for reconciliation. The benefit to customers is twofold, firstly Corona Generic delivers the capability for financial institutions to manage non-standard reconciliations and secondly it allows reconciliation across the complete lifecycle of the transaction.

Prinz explains, "Whenever you have a standardised financial instrument it makes sense to adopt a standards based product for its reconciliation, for example, Corona Cash. However, as customers move to deploying a "Recs Everywhere" strategy - where reconciliations are used across the enterprise and throughout the lifecycle of a transaction - they increasingly look to manage non-standard reconciliations. Corona Generic is "agnostic" in terms of its ability to take in different feeds and is capable of working across the entire range of financial instruments. For example it could match MT950 cash messages to MT300 FX confirmations to check the cash settlement eliminating that transaction from the risk postion. This highly generic product capability enables it to work across multiple systems, ensuring STP and status progress throughout the entire lifecycle of the transaction while automatically identifying any breaks that occur."

Many financial institutions are starting to migrate from batch to real time processing in order to minimise their risk associated with missing or manual intraday report processing. Corona 7.0 delivers the Corona Intra-day module which provides a solution to this problem, allowing organisations better control over real time risk management and allowing them to meet ever more demanding service level agreements.

"The FX market is a great example of a market that is increasingly reliant upon intraday reconciliation." explains Prinz. "CLS members as well as 3rd parties need to be able to carry out intraday reconciliations in order to ensure that their accounts are covered sufficiently so they avoid intraday interest payments. However, the FX market is not unique, other sectors of the financial services industry are also being driven by market initiatives such as Basel II, Real Time Nostro or STEP2 to use intraday reconciliations. Corona Intra-day provides a real time reconciliation solution to provide intraday liquidity management and risk management across all sectors of the industry."

Corona 7.0 also delivers Corona Corporate Actions, which manages the scheduling and reconciliation of corporate actions. The module is ISO 15022 compliant, enabling the solution to load corporate actions SWIFT messages and alternative formats. It automatically creates diary entries from incoming notifications, manages the instruction and then tracks and records the status and confirmation of the Corporate Action. The module is fully integrated with the alerting and exception management facilities of Corona.

All modules delivered with Corona 7.0 can now be accessed through a new highly scalable, browser based, user interface, Corona WebConnect. Corona WebConnect allows real time monitoring and management of information through DashBoard functionality, where relevant information is displayed to business users in recognisable formats of charts and graphs. For financial institutions looking to deploy the application in multiple sites the browser based client delivers major savings in both resources and cost as installation can be managed remotely.

Prinz concludes, "The wealth of functionality that SmartStream have delivered in Corona 7.0 will ensure that the product remains the market leading integrated transaction lifecycle management solution. By working closely with our large, global customer base and specifically a number of strategic Beta customers we are confident that Corona 7.0 will continue to deliver unrivalled matching rates and allow customers complete transaction visibility and control."