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 — […]
New Year’s Message: Pay More for OTC ISINs?
Update 12/30/2017: This article has been updated to include more details about the DSB’s €8.8 million figure for overhead. Data, operations and vendor procurement managers whose buy- and sell-side firms need international securities identification codes (ISINs) for over-the-counter derivative contracts could end up with some bad news come January 15. Financial firms might discover they […]
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 […]
FINRA to Broker-Dealers: Justify Order Routing Perks
Brokerage compliance managers might have to scale back their holiday plans. The US Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) is revisiting broker-dealer order routing, and it wants answers by the end of this month. Last month, the self-regulatory agency for broker-dealers sent an undisclosed number of broker-dealers a request for detailed information on how they quantify […]
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 […]
MiFID Challenge: Which OTC Derivatives to Report?
To report or not to report over-the-counter derivatives under MiFID II. That is the question that compliance and regulatory reporting managers will face when it comes to deciding which trades to include in their transaction reports the day after trades are executed. The wrong answer could cost them hefty fines but finding the right answer will […]
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 […]
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 […]
Unique Product IDs: Can the OTC-ISIN Win the Job?
Can International Securities Identification Numbers (ISINs) become the foundation for unique product identifiers (UPIs)? The new Derivatives Service Bureau (DSB) which will allocate ISINs for over-the-counter derivatives, appears to think so. It also thinks that it might be the organization issuing the UPIs, although it is willing to work with others. If such a scenario […]