Adoption of new standards, particularly when its voluntary and not driven by regulation, can take a long while to get from “nice idea” to a baseline necessity for doing business. Ask global network SWIFT which helped create ISO message types for communication information on payments, foreign exchange transactions and finally post-trade instructions for banks and […]
ISO 20022 for Corporate Actions: A for Effort; C for Completion in US? (Update)
Where SWIFT goes, Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. follows. Not a phrase heard very often, if ever. However, when it comes to moving the US financial industry to ISO 20022 messaging for corporate actions, DTCC appears to have relaxed some of its demands. Nearly a decade ago, SWIFT pressed the financial community hard to convert from […]
UCITS V: Just When Are Depositaries Liable, or Not?
When operations executives, their relationship management colleagues, not to mention their compliance directors can’t agree on how to talk about a topic, it qualifies as organizational confusion. When it’s industry-wide, it’s a bona fide hot potato. That is the situation today as custodian banks in Europe, acting as depositaries for traditional investment funds, attempt to make sense of […]
US Fund Managers: Tackling Cybersecurity as Operational Risk
What do retail department stores and US asset managers have in common? The potential for cyberattacks, says the Securities and Exchange Commission, which has put fund managers on high alert to shore up any deficiencies in their data security technology and procedures. The securities watchdog says it will be reviewing the cybersecurity work of investment […]
FIXing the Post-Trade Communications Process
Reducing time, risk and cost. That’s the mantra the FIX Trading Community promoted at an event it hosted in New York last week when recommending its message tags and workflow be used for locally matching post-trade instructions in all asset-classes. It’s also the beginning of a battle to win the hearts and minds of fund managers […]
Hedge Fund Managers: Taming the Data Headache
It’s a given that hedge fund managers consume data — and lots of it — to ensure the most lucrative trading strategies and efficient post-trade processes. They need to know just how the global market is moving at every fraction of a second every business day and just which transactions must be cleared and settled […]
Legal Entity Identifiers: Scrutiny of EU Firms Tightens
When the concept of a new global legal entity identifier first took shape among regulators in the US and across the globe, it was hailed as a brilliant revolutionary move. Financial firms and trading counterparties could now be appropriately identified and tracked by regulators seeking to mitigate systemic risk. No longer would they have to […]
Private Equity Managers: Data Becoming a ‘Four-Letter Word’?
Private equity fund managers are starting to crack under the pressure of finding data and turning it into useful intelligence for investors and regulators at record speed, say investment operations experts. Although many of them can ill afford it, they will eventually have to invest in the necessary data infrastructure for the same reasons as […]
EMIR: One Little Number Can Make or Break Reporting
With the European regulatory requirements for reporting exchange-traded and over-the-counter swap transactions less than a month away, fund managers can’t afford a leap of faith that they will be ready, warn regulatory and operations experts. There is a key nagging issue they must resolve before February 12: just who will create the 52-character unique trade […]
Europe’s AIFMD: Will US Fund Managers Bite or Should They?
The EU’s new Alternative Investment Managers Directive (AIFMD) is supposed to give alternative investment fund managers the same cachet as their traditional investment manager peers following UCITS. Or so, European regulators think. But the allure of AIFMD appears to have been lost on a critical sector of the alternative funds market. US fund managers aren’t […]