iFica

Background to iCA

The Corporate Actions Automation platform (iCA) was conceived to address the South African market’s need for a solution to address the automated processing of high volumes of elective events and proxy voting.

Through Ince and MarbleTech’s expertise in the preparation, presentation and management of a wide variety of corporate actions, we believe that iCA offers a compelling value proposition to engage customers in the elections & voting process, while significantly reducing the inherent risks of large scale, frequent corporate actions processing.

The service consists of a combination of an ongoing solution to ensure completeness and accuracy in setting up events, and technology to deliver events to customers and collect their decisions.

A short summary of these components is included below.

Corporate actions setup service

On a daily basis, the iCA operations team collect corporate events related to the South African financial markets. The focus of this exercise is to ensure that a complete set of all events relating to South African listed equities is captured, and that the events are defined on the iCA platform in accordance with market standards, internal business rules and customer preferences.

All documentation supporting the event setups are uploaded to the system, and made available to our clients and their customers. Our clients may choose to be responsible for the ultimate approval of event setups, and our workflow process supports the interaction between teams.

The following event types are supported:

• Mandatory events (for client notification only). These include events such as cash-only dividends, mandatory unbundlings or capital reductions.
• Elective dividends, including partial or non-partial electives and DRIPs. Metadata such as whether the dividend constitutes a foreign or REIT dividend is maintained, together with all ratios involved.
• All proxy voting aspects, including collecting the results of letters of representation requested.
• Generic events, for all events requiring customer feedback but which do not fit into the categories above.

Technology platform

Our platform is based on a best-of-breed technology stack, which facilitates the integration of our processing engine with a web-based front end to collect decisions, together with advanced email and SMS processing to deliver notifications to customers. Server stack is typically cloud based which makes deployment quicker and does not place any further strain on already overloaded internal IT resources. Should a on premise solution be the preference this will be undertaken.  

Corporate Identity

A client centric branded solution will be available for end-user customers, all outstanding events are presented in a portal branded to clients’ specifications and will align with their corporate ID. We will work with your branding team to ensure that all parameters are adhered to.