Commcise, the provider of award-winning research valuation and management solutions for financial services firms, is pleased to announce that it has released a new Contract Management module as part of CommciseBUY, the hosted, cloud-based platform which provides multi-asset integrated commission management and research valuation. The additional functionality has been driven by the recent industry move towards fixed price contracts, under which an asset manager agrees to take a set of services required by its research consumers from research providers for a fixed fee.

As part of the market developments following the introduction of the MiFID II regulations relating to research, many asset managers are now procuring research from their providers under umbrella contracts defining a constrained set of services, typically centered around written content. Beyond these contracted services, the parties may also agree a rate card for services purchased outside the core all-inclusive contract. The CommciseBUY platform supports both the packaged and a la carte services and also helps the asset manager process the invoices associated with all services.

The new module provides centralised agreement management with research providers, including portal accessed services and pay-per-user subscriptions. CommciseBUY now enables users to select the services to which they require access and delivers a view on their share of the cost for each of those services. These costs are integrated into each consumer’s spend, bringing “fixed”, “variable” and “discretionary” elements together in the research valuation and payment process.

The Commcise Rule Engine also identifies and tags those events that fit within the fixed price contract terms and automatically links provider consumption data to contracts. This gives the Asset Manager a view on value for money from fixed price arrangements.  Where interactions do not fit within the contract, CommciseBUY raises a post-event breach notification to help the asset manager ensure it is not at risk of appearing to be induced.

Paul Charie, Commcise Global Head of Sales commented, “We have designed and delivered Contract Management in partnership with several of our CommciseBUY clients. As the industry process of price discovery and service packaging is constantly evolving, we have developed the module to be extremely flexible, to ensure it can keep pace with the expected degree of change in the coming months. Asset managers, whether paying for research from client funds or from their own resources, are increasingly looking to ensure they are procuring and using research efficiently and effectively. The new module is a key component to help our clients meet this objective.”

CommciseBUY supports the full process life-cycle for commission reconciliation with Commission Sharing Agreement (CSA) brokers; sweeping of accrued CSA balances to the Research Payment Account (RPA); management of RPA; research budgeting and valuation; broker voting and payments; MiFID II reporting, including fund-level research cost allocation and invoice processing.

Commcise supports buy-sides, sell-sides and independent research providers in managing their business both locally and globally.