For operations and compliance professionals, the definition of financial crime is rapidly expanding to meet the threats of cyber crime, but the more common threat is money laundering or fraudulent wire transfers conducted by unscrupulous companies or individuals. For depositories and custodian banks, this traditional abuse of the financial system has acquired an additional level of […]
Tracking Beneficial Ownership: Finding Those Needles Can Hurt Plenty
For financial institutions finding the beneficial owners of the companies they do business with isn’t like looking for a needle in a haystack. It’s even worse. “It is more like looking for a needle in a stack of needles,” says Debra Geister, manager of Navigator Consulting Group, a St. Cloud, Minnesota-based regulatory compliance and operations […]
News to Use: Omgeo, SEI, and Broadridge
Custodians on Alert: Custodians and prime brokers will be able for the first time to input standing settlement instructions (SSIs) to Omgeo’s ALERT database, potentially reducing the number of trades which fail to settle on time. SSIs refer to the last leg of the post-trade communications process when asset managers tell their custodians or prime […]
KYC Utilities: How Many is Too Many?
When is four too high a number? When it is the number of virtually interchangeable third-party services specializing in helping financial firms meet their know-your customer and other regulatory requirements, acknowledge fund managers and even the providers themselves. Of course, just how many should be left standing and who that should be is a difficult question […]
News to Use: Whistleblower Update, Lending vs. Voting, and New TA Utility
SEC Chills Pre-taliation: The Securities and Exchange Commission’s enforcement of rules against whistleblower retaliation has just taken another giant step forward with the US regulatory agency’s first announcement it has penalized a firm for restrictive language in an employment agreement. Although the US$130,000 fine was against KBR Inc., not a financial services firm, attorneys specializing […]
Fund Managers: Fixing EMIR Reporting Glitches
Now that more than a year has passed since they’ve had to deal with new reporting requirements under the European Market Infrastructure Regulation (EMIR), fund managers are belatedly waking up to the fact they could soon face whopping regulatory fines for not submitting correct data on their derivative transactions to accredited trade repositories. Regulatory operations […]
US Mutual Funds Call for New Rules For “Lost” Investors
Investors of US mutual funds have long relished the benefits the investment vehicles provide: asset diversification, compounding and quick liquidity. Small investors gain the expertise of top portfolio managers, that would otherwise be available only to wealthy and institutional investors. But what investors may not know is that their mutual funds are legally required to […]
Common Tax Reporting Standards: The Tower of Babel
When US lawmakers decided to force foreign financial institutions to ante up the names of all their customers and investors that might owe unpaid US taxes, maybe they knew that they were burdening these financial firms with a complex and costly reporting burden. But who could have foreseen that they were launching a global fad among tax […]
FinOps Takes a Byte out of the News — 3/17/2015
A few news items that may be of interest to our readers… CalPERS Pioneering: US pension giant California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS) has become the first pension plan to join a fully committed repo facility at Chicago-headquartered derivatives clearinghouse OCC. The repo facility provides contingency liquidity in the event of a member default or […]
Cybersecurity in the C-Suite: A Matter of “Need to Know”
Cybersecurity has been described as everything from a top-down corporate mission to a shopping list for software packages that monitor networks and systems for suspicious activity. Given the breadth and complexity of even identifying the risks, it’s no wonder that all sorts of management are discovering they’re now riding the cybersecurity bus. Nowhere is this accumulation of corporate […]