US brokerage and bank operations and compliance managers will soon have to face an onerous back-office and legal challenge — figuring out how to make short sellers pay back $2.74 plus interest for each share of Dole Foods shorted more than three years ago. That money would be used to compensate beneficial investors who are considered the […]
Pre-Release ADRs: More SEC Fines on the Way?
First ITG. Who is next? That is the question fund managers and other investors are asking themselves after learning that the US Securities and Exchange Commission fined broker-dealer ITG $24.4 million for violating regulations on how it used the pre-released shares of American Depositary Receipts (ADRs). The SEC says that ITG violated Section 17(a)3 of […]
Making Every Proxy Vote Count is Hard Work
An investor casts its vote at an annual or other corporate meeting, but has no way of knowing whether it was actually received and counted. It could be rejected or even partially accepted, which defeats the purpose of casting the vote in the first place. While the US Securities and Exchange Commission has left market […]
T+2 in Canada: Affirmations in the Headlights Again
Canada and the US are in lockstep to shorten their settlement cycle from three days to two days on September 5, 2017, but Canada is taking its preparations one step further when it comes to the critical post-trade function of matching trade details. The Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA), the umbrella organization representing all of Canada’s […]
Equity Derivatives Withholding Tax Remains Taxing (Updated)
(Editor’s Note: On November 14, 2016 SIFMA asked the US Treasury to postpone the implementation date of IRS Section 871(m) from January 1, 2017 so that it can resolve a difference of opinion with G5 countries. The UK, Germany, Spain, France, and Italy have told the Treasury that dividend equivalent payments made outside the US […]
Accenture, Broadridge, Synechron on Blockchain
The financial world is spending countless hours — and millions of dollars — hypothesizing how blockchain — the new distributed way of storing information — could eliminate huge operational costs. Banks, broker-dealers, exchanges, and securities depositories have started exploring its potential vast use with the help of technology providers. Blockchain could theoretically be applied to […]
Northern Trust Minds the Corporate Actions Gap
A successful investment strategy is about more than just buying and selling the right stocks at the right price at the right time. It also depends on picking the best option when it comes to voluntary corporate actions or being able to recognize a bad decision after the fact. Northern Trust is helping its asset […]
Depository Reforms Russian Corporate Actions Risk
Sketchy information on annual meeting agendas or corporate actions announcements is not going to plague investors in Russia equities in the future. Nor will fund managers risk losing money as many do today, because the operational difficulties discourage them from participating. Russia’s corporate actions reform has given the country’s national securities depository National Settlement Depository (NSD) the […]
Asset Owners Put Managers on the Operational Hotseat
How do you run your business? If it sounds like an open-ended question for pension plans, endowments and other institutional investors to ask fund managers, it is intended to be. Institutional asset owners hope it will elicit a lengthy discussion over the policies, procedures and technology the fund manager uses to make money before they […]
Fund Operations Managers Weather UK’s Brexit Storm
While the UK and European Union leaders will have two years to come up with a gameplan for how the UK will separate from the European Union, middle and back-office operations professionals at fund management shops are taking it one day at a time during extreme market volatility. The UK’s legal limbo has caused higher trading […]