The have and have-nots. That is how operations and compliance executives at some fund management firms speak about the bifurcated system for how trades in US Treasuries clear. Fund managers tell FinOps Report they want a level playing field with broker-dealers. That means that buy-side trades in US Treasuries, such as bills, notes and bonds, […]
FINRA to Broker-Dealers: Are You Liquid Enough?
Risk and financial reporting managers at clearing firms and large broker-dealers could soon have to recode their back office systems and establish new procedures. Why? To quickly inform the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) whether they have a liquidity problem and report a lot more information about their financing deals. The self-regulatory agency for broker-dealers […]
Love Taxes, Operations: Be a Tax Ops Director
Knowledge of processing 1099 Forms, cost basis-reporting, Internal Revenue Service Section 871(m), financial transaction taxes and corporate actions, FATCA, and issues and errors management. Over ten years of corporate tax compliance experience necessary. Those are just some of the qualifications that large global asset servicing providers — Societe Generale, BNP Paribas and JP Morgan — […]
EU’s SRD: Reworking Proxy Services
Custodian bank operations managers should start planning to get their hands a lot dirtier in the proxy plumbing process. The new version of the European Shareholder Rights Directive (SRD) calls for them to respond to European issuer requests for identifying investors who hold more than 0.5 percent of a company’s stock, to forward proxy information […]
North Korea Sanctions: Tracking the Unknown Cohorts
US President Donald Trump’s order to block any “significant financial transactions” related to North Korea is presenting US financial firms with a rigorous challenge to their anti-money laundering procedures. Trade finance, trade surveillance and other departments will have to dig far deeper into customer identities, business relationships, and transactions to protect their firms from costly […]
EquiLend, Prime Brokers Sued: Collusion or Fair Game?
Prime brokers harmed beneficial owners of securities by protecting their turf and sabotaging fledgling electronic securities lending platforms that could have helped buy-side firms earn more revenues from their loans. That is the claim of four US pension plans and one trading firm that have sued six mega US prime brokers and securities lending platform EquiLend […]
Can Blockchain Supercharge Syndicated Loans?
Editor’s Update (4/26/2018): Finastra announced on April 24 that its Fusion LenderComm platform was commercially available, as an app on R3s Corda platform. Agent banks in the syndicated loan market can publish lender-specific deal positions on the ledger eliminating the need for lenders to query their agent banks about transaction history by phone, fax or […]
Global Network Management: Are My Assets Safe?
Global network managers of custodian banks are redefining the word relationship when it comes to monitoring local agent banks that safekeep assets of underlying clients in multiple countries. It is no longer enough to make a sporadic visit or have a phone call. Global network managers have become detectives sifting through mounts of data to […]
Artificial Intelligence: Do Risk Managers Get It?
When it comes to artificial intelligence, investment analysts, customer service managers and compliance managers seem to agree that the technology can help them make informed decisions more quickly and reduce investment, credit and regulatory risk. What about risk managers? They don’t understand how to incorporate AI into their risk metrics or participate in the decision-making […]
Form N-PORT: Managers Report Big Stress
Update 12/12/2017: Fund managers shouldn’t feel too relieved by the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s delay on when they must submit Form N-PORT. On December 8, the SEC said that fund managers can wait until April 2019 at the earliest to transmit their completed Form N-PORT to the regulatory agency’s Edgar system. However, fund managers […]