Tax operations may never be glamorous, but they’re about to get a long-overdue upgrade. Broadridge Financial Solutions and Xceptor have announced a strategic partnership that aims to automate the full global tax relief and tax reclaim lifecycle—an area notorious for fragmented workflows, inconsistent documentation, and regulatory whiplash.

For financial institutions grappling with cross-border tax obligations, swelling transaction volumes, and rapidly shifting rules, the Broadridge–Xceptor alliance lands at a pivotal moment. Their goal: build a unified, intelligent platform capable of handling everything from relief-at-source to digital filing and compliance monitoring.

If it works as advertised, it could be one of the most consequential asset servicing integrations we’ve seen in years.

A Single Platform for Tax Relief, Reclaims, and Filing

The partnership will integrate Xceptor Tax—Xceptor’s automation engine for tax workflows—directly into Broadridge’s Global Tax & Client Reporting Solution. The resulting product will support end-to-end processing for multi-jurisdictional tax operations, including:

• Relief at Source (RAS)
• Tax reclaims
• Digital regulatory filing
• Documentation management
• Eligibility monitoring
• Automated data ingestion and validation

For firms currently juggling spreadsheets, legacy systems, and jurisdiction-specific portals, the promise of unifying tax processing into a single digital environment is hard to ignore.

Tom Burke, President of Global Asset Servicing at Broadridge, framed the deal as a major step toward a “truly global, integrated asset servicing solution.” He’s not exaggerating: global tax operations are buckling under regulatory pressure and accelerated market activity. Manual processing simply doesn’t scale anymore.

By pairing Broadridge’s market infrastructure with Xceptor’s automation engine, the two vendors want to give firms an alternative to layered, decades-old workflows—one that increases accuracy, speed, and cross-market compliance.

Why This Matters: Tax Ops Is a Growing Pain Point

While trading, settlement, and payments have all enjoyed AI-driven modernization in recent years, cross-border tax remains one of finance’s least automated disciplines. It’s also one of the most risk-heavy, thanks to:

• Non-standard documentation requirements
• Jurisdiction-specific relief rules
• Changing regulatory frameworks
• High rates of processing errors
• The resource drain of manual reclaims

New regimes such as EU FASTER and MiKaDiV are only adding to the complexity, forcing firms to upgrade or face cascading operational bottlenecks.

The Broadridge–Xceptor partnership arrives as the industry repeatedly asks for the same thing: a single, digitized, scalable tax framework that isn’t stitched together with middleware and hope.

Integration as a Differentiator

The combined solution isn’t just another automation layer. It aims to bind all the critical components—data, documents, decisions—into one platform.

According to the companies, key features will include:

• Out-of-the-box integration with existing systems
• Centralized documentation and regulatory updates
• Automated identification of RAS and reclaim opportunities
• Eligibility checks based on validated data
• Straight-through processing for reclaims and relief requests
• Audit trails for compliance and operational transparency

This approach isn’t unique in ambition—other vendors, including market infrastructure providers and tax specialists, are racing to modernize global withholding tax. But few bring Broadridge’s cross-market footprint and Xceptor’s configurable, enterprise-grade automation together under one umbrella.

Michiel Verhoeven, CEO of Xceptor, emphasized that the partnership will deliver “control, visibility, and scalability” across tax operations—three words that sum up the pain points voiced by nearly every major custodian, asset manager, and broker-dealer today.

Replacing Manual Workflows With Intelligent Processing

The reality is that many institutions still rely on manual or semi-manual tax workflows. PDF forms, email attestations, multi-market exceptions, ad hoc analysis—the tax lifecycle has long resisted standardization.

Broadridge and Xceptor want to change that by:

• Digitizing documentation
• Creating accurate, reusable data flows
• Automating reclaim submission and tracking
• Reducing error rates
• Accelerating time-to-relief
• Providing up-to-date compliance logic across jurisdictions

It’s not just an efficiency play. Faster and more accurate tax relief can materially impact investment returns, fund performance, and client satisfaction.

As transaction volumes rise—especially in global equities, ETFs, derivatives, and alternative investments—the stakes get higher.

Positioning for the Future of Asset Servicing

This partnership also reflects a broader strategic push by Broadridge to build what it calls the most comprehensive end-to-end asset servicing platform in the market. The tax automation layer was the missing puzzle piece.

Compared with rivals building modular or multi-vendor ecosystems, Broadridge is leaning into a single-platform future—something large global institutions have increasingly demanded to reduce integration cost and operational risk.

The timing is significant: regulators worldwide are enforcing stricter standards for tax transparency, beneficial ownership, data accuracy, and digital submission. A unified tax platform isn’t just convenient—it’s becoming essential infrastructure.

The Bottom Line

Broadridge and Xceptor are positioning themselves at the center of a long-overdue modernization wave in global tax operations. By merging Broadridge’s infrastructure with Xceptor’s intelligent automation, the partnership promises to simplify one of the most complex and regulation-heavy processes in finance.

If executed well, the combined offering could become the backbone of tax operations for global custodians, asset managers, and brokers navigating increasingly intricate cross-border rules.

Tax may not grab the biggest headlines in fintech, but make no mistake: this is one of the most strategically important integrations of the year—and a signal that automation is finally catching up to one of the industry’s most stubborn workflows.