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 […]
Unified Managed Accounts: MMI Resurrects the Model Messaging Hub
Asset managers can start looking forward to an industry-standard way to communicate with sponsors and overlay management of unified managed accounts (UMAs). Resurrecting the hub concept announced with much fanfare by the DTCC in 2011 and quietly abandoned by the US infrastructure giant the next year, a replacement is in the works through a collaboration between the Money Management […]
US FINCEN: Digging Deeper into Beneficial Owner Identities
Financial firms have it hard enough verifying the identity of their customers. They have to make certain to ask all the right questions and hope they get the right answers. It is an error-prone process, but at least the main thing the bank, broker-dealer, or mutual fund has to know is just who it is directly […]
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 […]
AIFMD’s Depositary Lite: Handy Option With Limited Lifespan?
It’s lite, but is it right? That’s the question, some fund managers should be asking themselves about which business model they use when selecting a depositary to perform critical post-trade services under the new European Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive (AIFMD), a regulatory initiative which enables cross-border marketing of alternative funds in EU countries. Given […]
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 […]