Five hundred to one thousand percent. That’s the eye-popping prediction of the coming increase in margin calls in a new report from US market infrastructure Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. (DTCC), “Trends, Risks and Opportunities in Collateral Management.” The trigger: new regulations and recommendations requiring far more transactions in far more asset classes to be collateralized. Relying on […]
WAMCO Fine: A Coding Error or Compliance Breakdown?
A computer coding error. That’s how most media outlets explained one of the key reasons the US Securities and Exchange Commission and the US Department of Labor whammied a large US fixed-income fund manager with a US$22 million fine. The second is inappropriate cross-trading which unfairly benefited one group of clients at the expense of others. But […]
Private Equity Managers: Data Becoming a ‘Four-Letter Word’?
Private equity fund managers are starting to crack under the pressure of finding data and turning it into useful intelligence for investors and regulators at record speed, say investment operations experts. Although many of them can ill afford it, they will eventually have to invest in the necessary data infrastructure for the same reasons as […]
Europe’s AIFMD: Will US Fund Managers Bite or Should They?
The EU’s new Alternative Investment Managers Directive (AIFMD) is supposed to give alternative investment fund managers the same cachet as their traditional investment manager peers following UCITS. Or so, European regulators think. But the allure of AIFMD appears to have been lost on a critical sector of the alternative funds market. US fund managers aren’t […]
Reconciliation Moves Into Fee Accounting
Once viewed strictly as a matter of matching up cash, positions and transactions, the middle-office task of reconciliation is quickly moving into the trade-execution and post-trade space. The reasons are self-evident: not only are regulators demanding better control of operational risk, but C-level management are requiring more precise analysis of the bottom line for each unit. “It’s all […]
FCA Leaves Asset Owners to Self-Police Custodian Fees
In deciding not to monitor the fees charged by UK custodians for some value-added outsourced services, the UK’s securities watchdog may have just opened a floodgate of lucrative business for third-party consultants. A new committee just established by the UK fund management trade group Investment Management Association (IMA) along with fund managers and custodians is […]