With about thirty European countries moving to a two-day settlement cycle next month, concern is starting to mount that the fixed-income market will trail its equities counterpart in meeting the shorter timetable, leaving fund managers and broker-dealers to pay a heftier cleanup bill than initially anticipated. Securities depositories responsible for settling domestic and cross-boder transactions say that they […]
Catching a Money Laundering Thief: Combing Data in a Tower of Babel
Looking at the multitude of employment ads placed by executive search firms and large global banks, it becomes clear that the world’s biggest financial institutions are spending lots of money hiring new staff to combat potential money laundering and other illegal activities. It’s an understandable kneejerk reaction to what has been an onslaught of mega financial […]
Fund Managers: Picking the Best Clearinghouse, Intricate Juggling Act
Fund managers can no longer afford to view clearinghouses as stodgy infrastructures which just exist for the sake of servicing mega broker-dealers and banks. With regulators now requiring far more transactions — particularly in the over-the-counter derivatives market — to be processed through clearinghouses, asset managers must realize they have some choices to make and […]
Russia Sanctions: Narrow Focus Makes Compliance Trouble
Asset managers have to deal with trading restrictions against countries on U.S. or foreign sanctions lists every day. Trading with certain countries or in issues from certain companies is forbidden, period. The black and white requirements are clear to understand so they are easy to follow. Not so, when it comes to the new sanctions imposed by the U.S. government […]
Chief Compliance Officers: Five Steps to Hiring the Right Team
You may as well act as though you’re responsible for everything, because you’re going to have to live with the results. If that sounds like the motto of an executive who doesn’t want to delegate, it isn’t. It’s knowing that taking personal control is sometimes the only right thing to do. That is definitely the case when it […]
US Cost-Basis Reporting: Easing the Taxing Final Lap (Updated)
FinOps takeaway: You can’t second-guess the investor; be ready for everything. Although the third phase of the US Internal Revenue Service’s new rules on cost-basis reporting — those affecting accounts in debt instruments — technically became effective in January 1, 2014, broker-dealers and other financial intermediaries have plenty more operational blood, sweat and tears to spill […]
Hedge Fund Managers: The Big Headache of Healthcare Reform
FinOps takeaway: Your count of “full-time employees” may not be what the IRS says it is. Mainstream attention on the controversial US healthcare legislation has focused on how difficult or financially affordable access to health insurance may be for individual people. For employers, there is a far larger and only slowly emerging story in the huge difficulty and cost they […]
Money Market Fund Managers: SEC Ships New Operational Challenges
After years of uncertainty about how regulatory reform would play out, money market fund managers may be relieved to know finally how they will be regulated by new rules adopted by the US Securities and Exchange Commission. But the news won’t be particularly comforting to the operations, compliance and technology staff of the funds, which represent a third of […]
Alt Mutual Funds: Seeking Alpha under SEC Scrutiny
If it looks like a duck, but honks like a goose, is it a duck or is it a goose? As far as the US Securities and Exchange Commission is concerned, the duck can honk all it wants, it still has to live by duck rules. The regulatory agency is making certain that mutual funds that act like […]
Fund Managers: Addressing the Regulatory Data Quagmire (Updated)
Dodd-Frank. EMIR. FATCA. AIFMD. Solvency II. The reporting obligations of fund managers just keep growing. The snowballing burden — with new regulations and reporting rules popping up at an alarming pace — is forcing many to step back from their usual resigned willingness to learn and follow one regulatory rule after another. The emerging alternative: looking at the bigger picture of […]