MSCI Inc. and Longview Solutions Deal With a Prior Provider Unexpectedly Pulling a Product From the Market.

• Author: Kaltner, Savilla

This is the fourth installment of our Tax Technology Corner. As a corporate tax professional, you know how important technology is and how it's evolving at warp speed. With new regulatory and compliance initiatives in the federal, state, and international areas, landmark tax reform legislation, and globalization of tax monitoring and enforcement, keeping up with tax technology is not a luxury--it's a necessity. Each installment of this column will pair a taxpayer with a service provider. Together, in Q&A format, they'll tell a story about how they have worked together to solve a specific tax problem, implement a better solution, cut costs, or improve productivity. In this installment, Savilla Kaltner, executive director of tax at MSCI Inc., and Jamie Eagan, vice president of product management, tax, for Longview Solutions, discuss how they dealt with a prior provider pulling a product from the market. Michael Levin-Epstein, senior editor of Tax Executive, moderated the discussion.

Michael Levin-Epstein: Could you each give us a little background on your organizations?

Savilla Kaltner: MSCI is a leading provider of critical decision support tools and services for the global investment community. With over forty-five years of expertise in research, data, and technology, we power better investment decisions by enabling clients to understand and analyze key drivers of risk and return and confidently build more effective portfolios. We create industry-leading research-enhanced solutions that clients use to gain insight into and improve transparency across the investment process. Headquartered in New York, we have thirty-one offices in twenty-one countries. Our clients include some of the world's largest investors, including pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, asset managers, hedge funds, banks, and more.

Jamie Eagan: Longview Solutions is a corporate performance management company. We've been around for twenty-five years, entering the tax space in 2006 with our tax provision offering. Longview recognized the strategic value our solution can bring to tax organizations and [has] branched out into other solutions beyond provision related to country-by-country reporting, tax analytics, operational transfer pricing, and a tax data hub. We're focused on delivering strategic value to leading tax and finance organizations worldwide. As a company, we have roughly 1,200 customers across our connected finance product lines worldwide. We're headquartered...