SIX, which operates the infrastruture for the Swiss and Spanish financial centres, has launched a service to provide clients, advisers and portfolio managers in the wealth advisory industry with tax classifications on individual securities.
The service allows users to analyse the tax consequences of financial products, to anticipate the tax-related costs of an investment on that security and to find better investment options.
While the existing product "SIX Tax Score" addresses the overall tax suitability aspect of financial products by looking at the tax cost of an investment, "SIX Tax on Instrument" is geared at pre-investment workflows in wealth advisory, allowing for more detailed portfolio simulations and portfolio constructions from a tax perspective.
Marion Leslie, Head Financial Information & Executive Board member, SIX, highlighted: "This latest tax offering is a great addition to our suite of tax data services, designed to increase efficiency and reduce tax complexity for the Wealth Advisory industry, enabling improved targeting of investments and portfolios."
"SIX Tax on Instrument" enables clients to access up to 60 data fields per tax regime covering financial products such as Equities, Bonds, Funds and Structured Products with attributes on Income Tax, Wealth Tax, Capital Gains & Losses Tax, and generic tax details. The service is designed to help client advisors and portfolio managers achieve superior after-tax returns by providing insights about tax implications and costs, allowing them to optimize their clients' investment portfolios.
The launch of the service meets a growing need among wealth advisors for detailed tax cost indicator information and additional tax categorisation attributes to help them make projections for expected returns, especially important in an increasingly complex regulatory environment. "SIX Tax on Instrument" currently covers the UK, Switzerland and France tax jurisdictions with plans to expand to a further 13 countries in the future including Belgium, Luxembourg, Italy, Spain and the US among others.
The service will be available via standard reference data feed or via suitability platform/API to allow for easy integration into clients' existing systems.
SIX worked with Investment Navigator and NOVERAS to develop the service. NOVERAS acts as a content provider, enriching the data received from SIX with additional tax attributes and is responsible for organising the fiscal data categorisations. Investment Navigator receives this enriched data and shares these tax insights with users through its platform and API, enabling automated rule-based tax suitability assessments to identify tax harmful products. The Tax on Instrument data is also available on the Investment Navigator platform for clients with a clear suitability outcome for all financial products, cross-asset classes.
Following the launch of "SIX Tax Score" in September last year, "SIX Tax on Instrument" is the second service from SIX directly targeting advisors and solidifies that SIX is tapping into other parts of the value chain like the front-office of wealth management.
SIX operates and develops infrastructure services for the Swiss and Spanish Stock Exchanges, for Post-Trade Services, Banking Services and Financial Information with the aim of raising efficiency, quality and innovative capacity across the entire value chain of the Swiss and Spanish financial centers.
The company is owned by its users (121 banks). With a workforce of some 3,500 employees and a presence in 20 countries, it generated operating income of CHF 1.38bn and Group net profit of CHF 439.6m in 2020.
Investment Navigator launched its flagship service in 2014 by providing suitability assessments with clear outcomes and rationales on ISIN-level. Since then, the company constantly innovated and expanded its service scope to holistic offering management solutions in close collaboration with its renowned customers around the world. Investment Navigator is privately-owned and headquartered in Zurich.
