The alternative investment funds market is undergoing an eight year itch. That long ago in 2007, a group of securities depositories, fund administrators and custodians launched a project to create ISO 20022-compliant message types for orders and redemptions of units of alternative investment funds. The level of adoption of the new messaging was disappointing, and it […]
US T+2 Settlement: The Long Journey Officially Begins
What a difference a day makes. Until September 16, the US financial industry had only been talking about a two-day settlement cycle. Only a preliminary roadmap of the stepping stones to T+2 had been completed, indicating that at least 30 operational workflows will be affected, requiring rule, behavioral and technology changes. On that day Securities and Exchange Commission […]
Fighting Financial Crime: Making Due With the Omnibus Account
A bank or broker-dealer opens an account in its name with a securities depository. One of its customers — a fund manager, broker-dealer or other firm — is involved with either money laundering activities or violating regulations involving sanctions against an individual, country or corporation. Even worse, one of their clients did the dirty deed. […]
Euroclear Claims First Matching Service for Payments
News of the successful launch of pan-European settlement platform Target2 Securities might be barely cold, but Euroclear, owner of the world’s largest international securities depository and several European depositories, is already taking as stab at creating new revenue streams. Based on technology developed in conjunction with London’s Merit Software, Euroclear has just launched a central matching […]
Transfer Agents: Preventing Fraud a Delicate Balancing Act
The work of stock transfer agents may require a lot of detail management, as well as complex interactions with issuers, shareholders and various intermediaries, but the field isn’t likely to be associated with investor fraud. That is, until now. Two commissioners at the US Securities and Exchange Commission are urging the agency to take a harder look […]
OTC Derivatives: The Identifier Debate Heats Up in Europe
As over-the-counter derivatives emerge from the shadowed status of private bilateral contracts into the relative sunlight of clearinghouse operations and regulatory reporting, there is a war heating up about a brand new problem — how these deals will be identified. Stocks, bonds, exchange-traded derivatives and other financial instruments are all regularly assigned unique codes that […]
Europe’s Target2Securities: On Target or Not?
Will T2S launch as scheduled? Nine years after the European Central Bank proposed the initially controversial idea of launching a single centralized settlement platform for domestic and cross-border European securities transactions, the plans to launch might have hit a snag. It wouldn’t be the first time, but this time it would be at the 11th […]
DTCC Embraces ISO 20022 for Corporate Action Elections
Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation’s corporate actions transformation project could well become a gamechanger for the US market by including the use of ISO 20022-compliant messages for elections, as well as notifications on corporate events. Beyond the obvious reduction of operational risk in the stickiest aspect of corporate actions processing, the expanded use of ISO […]
Crime Prevention: Breaching the Veil of Omnibus Accounts
For operations and compliance professionals, the definition of financial crime is rapidly expanding to meet the threats of cyber crime, but the more common threat is money laundering or fraudulent wire transfers conducted by unscrupulous companies or individuals. For depositories and custodian banks, this traditional abuse of the financial system has acquired an additional level of […]
Fund Managers: Fixing EMIR Reporting Glitches
Now that more than a year has passed since they’ve had to deal with new reporting requirements under the European Market Infrastructure Regulation (EMIR), fund managers are belatedly waking up to the fact they could soon face whopping regulatory fines for not submitting correct data on their derivative transactions to accredited trade repositories. Regulatory operations […]