With collateral potentially becoming a scarce resource over the next few years, securities depositories are quickly stepping up to the plate to ease access, but it remains uncertain just how much their new services will help the most needy: fund managers. The announcement of the alliance between two mega market infrastructures — international securities depository Euroclear in […]
EU Settlements: More Corporate Actions Claims?
In focusing strictly on settling domestic and cross-border trades, the new central settlement platform, Target2Securities (T2S) may end up causing unintended operational glitches and additional costs when it comes to how corporate actions of European issuers are processed. Or so fear some managers who apparently aren’t buying the assertions made by custodians and securities depositories […]
UCITS V: Devil in the Compensation Details
UCITS V — the latest incarnation of the decades-old European legislation easing cross-border marketing of investment funds — has fund managers angry about what they see as far more rigid rules governing their bonuses. Just adopted by the European Parliament, the legislation not only massively reduces the short-term variable compensation of so-called “risk-taking” staff, but defers […]
Custodians Under Pressure Refocus on Middle Office Basics
Squeezed from the top and squeezed from the bottom. It’s only natural that custodians and other asset servicing providers are feeling the pinch. A barrage of new regulations, shorter settlement cycle, new European centralized settlement platform on the one side and, on the other, mounting client demands are forcing custodians to refocus their attentions on […]
Fund Managers Struggle to Analyze Swap Transaction Costs
Transaction cost analysis — an everyday discipline in the equities and fixed-income markets referring to the total expense involved in completing a transaction — is now becoming more important to swaps players who need to reap the same benefits as their traditional investment peers. Unfortunately, the US$650 trillion swaps market remains dismally behind other markets, leaving […]
Bloomberg’s FIGIs: Can Data Giant’s IDs Usurp ISINs as Global Standard? (Updated)
ISIN — the 12-digit alphanumeric international securities identification code and longstanding standard for identifying securities for cross-border trading and post-trade processing — is facing an unlikely competitor, a proprietary code designed by commercial data giant Bloomberg. The 27-member board of directors of the Object Management Group (OMG), an international organization concerned with data integration standards, is set to […]
Fund Managers: Raising the Operational Bar for Uncleared Swaps
With regulators on both sides of the Atlantic wanting bespoke swaps trades to fall under new margin guidelines, fund managers can ill-afford to sit idly by and rely simply on the negotiating skills of their legal advisors to come up with the best terms possible. Buy-side firms will need bring the so-called uncleared swap transactions […]
DTCC Puts Defrosting of Issuer Chills on Hold: Now What?
By all appearances, it’s back to square one for US corporate issuers when it comes to dealing with the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation and the manner in which it imposes minor or more severe restrictions on a newly public company accessing some or all of its services. Any possible future changes in DTCC’s adjudication of so-called […]
Merrill’s Reconciliation Fine: What Happens When Middle Office Fails
Reconciliation: it’s an everyday process in buy- and sell-side shops, where overworked middle-office analysts pay close attention to details and hope technology works. Like all post-trade operations, it often draws the attention of C-level executives only when something goes wrong. Even worse, as evidenced in a recent case involving Merrill Lynch, mistakes can also elicit […]
Outsourcing the CIO Role: A Rigorous Exercise in Matchmaking
In an increasingly complex environment of regulatory mandates and investment options, endowments, foundations and pension plans are taking a tack widely accepted in the post-trade communications market: outsourcing the critical functions of a chief investment officer. “They [asset owners] can easily create an investment policy — what they will or won’t invest in — but when it comes […]