The financial risk following discrepancies — or breaks — in matching trade details for derivative transactions can be serious business. Fund managers can easily encounter over a thousand trade breaks annually.When the process goes bad, it can go very bad and a widely anticipated growth in trading volume of exchange-traded derivatives (ETDs), makes an argument for greater automation compelling. While much of […]
Fund Managers: Outsourcing Trade Operations Not For Faint-Hearted
It’s become commonplace for fund managers to outsource middle and back-office operations. After all, who wants to staff and oversee the labor-intensive work that comes after trade execution, especially if it can be contracted out to specialists? It’s commonly understood that this type of outsourcing can reduce operating costs, address regulatory compliance requirements, and most important, […]
Validating NAVs: An Ounce of Prevention Saves a Lot of Grief
who is Lilatorrell Net asset value, or NAV for short: it’s a basic calculation which hundreds of mutual and other investment fund managers have to make each day to allow investors to know just how much they will pay to buy and sell shares or units. While the timetable for when the figure must be […]
Private Equity Market: Can New Data Standards Win?
Adoption of new standards, particularly when its voluntary and not driven by regulation, can take a long while to get from “nice idea” to a baseline necessity for doing business. Ask global network SWIFT which helped create ISO message types for communication information on payments, foreign exchange transactions and finally post-trade instructions for banks and […]
ISO 20022 for Corporate Actions: A for Effort; C for Completion in US? (Update)
Where SWIFT goes, Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. follows. Not a phrase heard very often, if ever. However, when it comes to moving the US financial industry to ISO 20022 messaging for corporate actions, DTCC appears to have relaxed some of its demands. Nearly a decade ago, SWIFT pressed the financial community hard to convert from […]
UCITS V: Just When Are Depositaries Liable, or Not?
When operations executives, their relationship management colleagues, not to mention their compliance directors can’t agree on how to talk about a topic, it qualifies as organizational confusion. elizabeth berkley nude When it’s industry-wide, it’s a bona fide hot potato. That is the situation today as custodian banks in Europe, acting as depositaries for traditional investment funds, attempt to […]
US Fund Managers: Tackling Cybersecurity as Operational Risk
What do retail department stores and US asset managers have in common? The potential for cyberattacks, says the Securities and Exchange Commission, which has put fund managers on high alert to shore up any deficiencies in their data security technology and procedures. The securities watchdog says it will be reviewing the cybersecurity work of investment […]
Proxy Season: More Work For Less Money?
US broker-dealers and banks responsible for distributing proxy materials to beneficial shareholders might have reason to be unhappy this proxy season. Not counting all the overtime they will have to do to ensure their “street name” investors receive proxy materials, financial intermediaries might just get paid a lot less to do so. The Securities and […]
Scottrade Fine: $2.5 Million When “Oops” Isn’t Enough
US IT and compliance directors need to pay a lot closer attention to how they jointly test and evaluate critical data generated by back-office systems. That’s the bare bones lesson, according to ten IT and compliance managers speaking with FinOps Report, that financial firms should learn from Scottrade’s reporting fiasco which resulted in a fine […]
T+2: Coming to US Fund Managers
How much difference can it make that a US trade group representing mutual fund advisors adds its support to longstanding efforts by the Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. to move the US to a two-day settlement cycle? Enough to make it clear that the ball is now rolling, and deadlines are being considered. The […]