A New York appeals court has just sent a stern warning to Wall Street, fintech and other firms: you can’t fire any of your employees simply because of who they married to or are even romantically involved with. The Appellate Division of New York’s First Department ruled that Christopher Morse, now vice president of electronic […]
Margin: Tackling Initial Hurdle for Uncleared Swaps
First it was variation margin. Now it is initial margin for uncleared swap transactions causing compliance, operations and financial technology managers at fund management shops angst. As of September 1, 2019 many fund managers must know whether they meet the threshold for posting initial margin, calculate it correctly and set up the right custodial contracts […]
Crypto Laundering: AML Regs Tighten
Anti-money laundering managers at banks and other financial institutions need to adapt their customer onboarding and transaction-monitoring approaches to cryptocurrency investors or risk regulatory fines, warn AML experts. Cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, already are involved in nearly ten percent of the total US$2 trillion of dirty money that is washed annually. That percentage is […]
Custody: Unchartered Waters for Digital Assets
Qualified custodian. That’s a term that compliance and operations managers at registered investment fund advisors, not to mention the US Securities and Exchange Commission, are now grappling with, when it comes to the safekeeping of digital assets. The reason is two-fold. For starters, it is unclear whether the SEC’s custody rule for RIAs investing in […]
Striking an NAV: Fund Managers’ Contingency Options
(Editor’s Update on December 5, 2018: US fund managers are getting serious about striking back-up NAVs on their own. Milestone Group tells FinOps Report that it has nabbed two top-tier US headuartered fund managers to use its pControl Oversight platform to monitor their fund administrators and to strike back-up NAVs in-house, instead of relying on […]
Cybersecurity and GDPR: the Budget Battles
Protecting critical data will top the list of challenges chief compliance officers face over the next three years. So will figuring out how to calculate and divide the budget with their IT, risk, finance and operations peers. Chief compliance officers are responsible for protecting their firms from reputational and legal risk. They are accustomed to […]
SEC 12b-1 Fee Amnesty: Costly Ops Work
A, B, C. Those three simple letters of the English alphabet could cause plenty of administrative grief for compliance and middle office operations managers at US mutual fund management firms over the next few months. That is, if they hope to take advantage of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s leniency program on overcharges to investors in […]
FINRA Rule 4210: Managers Beware of Margin Calls
With less than 100 days left before new Rule 4210 of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority becomes effective, broker-dealers aren’t the only ones that should be preparing for new margin requirements for to-be-announced (TBAs) transactions and other forward settling fixed-income trades. Even if indirectly, investment management firms will also be in the regulatory crosshairs. Time is […]
FINRA New Ops Certification: Two Exams Better?
What is the difference between a stock, a bond, a derivative, an exchange-traded fund and other financial products? What are customer suitability rules, margin rules and custody rules? These might sound like simple questions, but for US brokerage operations managers who must abide by changes in test formats imposed by the US Financial Industry Regulatory Authority […]
US T+1 Settlement: Not So Fast (Updated)
Update (May 13, 2018): Come late 2019, bank and broker-dealer members of the US Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. could look forward to reducing their settlement exposures by one day while retaining the current two-day settlement cycle. DTCC now says that US trades could be settled before the market opens on T+2 instead of the […]