A, B, C. Those three simple letters of the English alphabet could cause plenty of administrative grief for compliance and middle office operations managers at US mutual fund management firms over the next few months. That is, if they hope to take advantage of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s leniency program on overcharges to investors in […]
US T+1 Settlement: Not So Fast (Updated)
Update (May 13, 2018): Come late 2019, bank and broker-dealer members of the US Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. could look forward to reducing their settlement exposures by one day while retaining the current two-day settlement cycle. DTCC now says that US trades could be settled before the market opens on T+2 instead of the […]
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 […]
Artificial Intelligence: Do Risk Managers Get It?
When it comes to artificial intelligence, investment analysts, customer service managers and compliance managers seem to agree that the technology can help them make informed decisions more quickly and reduce investment, credit and regulatory risk. What about risk managers? They don’t understand how to incorporate AI into their risk metrics or participate in the decision-making […]
MiFID II: Proving Best Execution Is Data Challenge
With the arrival of MiFID II, trade execution will no longer be solely the concern of the trading desk. It will take a village of compliance, operations, portfolio managers, IT managers and even website designers for financial firms to prove they have met the best execution requirements of the second incarnation of the Markets in […]
Seeking Depository: Call Ireland’s Central Bank (Updated)
Update (May 3, 2018) Bank and broker-dealer members of Euroclear UK & Ireland now have to worry about where they will settle trades in Irish equities post-Brexit. They will no longer be able to do so through the shared UK and Irish depository and parent Euroclear recently announced that it has abandoned plans to set […]
Unclaimed Assets: New Rules, New Ops Headaches
Shareholder recordkeeping managers will soon need to change their procedures and back-office systems to comply with new state regulations and, potentially, a Supreme Court decision affecting unclaimed accounts. The assets in those “lost” accounts can help states close budget deficits, so states will do whatever it takes to get their hands on the money. Delaware […]
EU Benchmarks: Time to Take Inventory
Some middle office and compliance managers will soon have their work cut out for them creating a benchmark inventory management process to show European regulators that they use approved benchmarks. Effective January 1, 2018, the European Benchmark Regulation (BMR) will require that European Union-supervised entities who want to enter into financial contracts or instruments referencing […]
New Tax on US Convertible Bonds: Taxing Air?
The US Internal Revenue Service wants withholding agents to collect tax on upticks of the rights of convertible bondholders, despite protests that the levy is nothing more than “tax on air.” That’s how some tax attorneys and operations specialists view the IRS’ Section 305(c) rule on taxing adjustments to the conversion ratio of US convertible financial instruments, as […]