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 […]
NY State of Mind for Cybersecurity: Take Three
The US Labor Day weekend won’t be a happy one for some cybersecurity compliance, technology and operations managers at New York-based banks. They will likely be scrambling to successfully implement the third phase of New York’s onerous cybersecurity rules, effective September 3. Among the multitude of tasks to complete under 23 NYCRR 500 encrypting data and […]
Europe’s CSDR: Custodians Face Reporting Headaches
The European Central Securities Depositories Regulation (CSDR) is quickly turning into a misnomer for the legislation. Operations and IT managers at custodian banks must quickly develop new data consolidation and message reformatting workflow and technology to deliver the right information on settled and unsettled trades to local regulators in July 2019. Given that the pan- […]
CUSIP ID Codes Enter World of Blockchain
Equities and bonds have identification numbers so why not tokenized asset offerings (TAOs). That’s the premise of a new agreement between blockchain startup Templum Markets and CUSIP Global Services (CGS) whose goal is to promote liquidity and post-trade operational efficiency for TAOs. North America’s national numbering agency will now issue CUSIPs or nine-digit alphanumeric codes […]
BofAML’s Fake Trade Reports: Governance Breakdown?
How could Bank of America Merrill Lynch get away with giving institutional customers phony trade execution, transaction cost analysis and expense reports for five years? Ten brokerage operations and IT managers contacted by FinOps Report can only speculate after reading the scant details in separate settlement reports issued by the Office of the Attorney General […]
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 […]
GDPR: Final Call for US Asset Managers
Does Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) apply to me? If compliance and operations managers at US asset management firms are asking themselves that question, they are already in hot water. They should have started data mapping and amending their contracts with third-party service providers such as fund administrators and transfer agents, say data privacy […]
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 […]