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 […]
Cryptocurrency: Next Frontier for Cost-Basis Reporting
US personal tax day, April 17, was either the beginning of a lot of heartache or overdue operational relief for investors in cryptocurrency. Investors who haven’t paid the right amount of taxes for profits earned during the cryptocurrency boom could face fines and audits from the Internal Revenue Service. Alternatively, they could also benefit from […]
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 […]
Unclaimed Checks: Delaware on the Hunt Again?
Operations and compliance managers at US banks had better be prepared to defend their escheatment policies for uncashed checks and money orders to Delaware. The state could use the data it uncovers during the discovery period of a Supreme Court case involving MoneyGram’s uncashed “official checks” to dig deeper into the unclaimed property records of […]
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 […]