Guest Contributor: Mark Wickersham, Director of Product, ByAllAccounts, Inc. Mid-market asset managers drowning in compliance costs are reaching for better reconciliation systems in order to expand their AUM without collapsing their margins. For many investment management firms, new channels of product distribution bring additional back-office operational burdens: new systems to learn, different ways to retrieve
Guest Blog
Outsourcing Drivers
Guest Contributor: Jon Anderson, Head of Valuations & OTC Derivatives, SS&C GlobeOp Asset Managers of all stripes are pursuing the opportunity to outsource all or part of their operations to qualified service providers. The reasons vary, but hedge funds, pension companies, corporate treasuries and insurers are looking at outsourcing post-trade activities. Nowhere is this more
Back-Office
Rethinking Reconciliation
Guest Contributor: Michael Alexander, EVP & COO Business Process Outsourcing, Broadridge Financial Solutions Financial institutions can enhance risk management and reduce costs through a reconciliation global center of excellence. Timing is critical. The cost of falling further behind industry standards is rising. To date, the “path of least resistance” has been to create a series
Back-Office
Transforming Uncertainty into Opportunity
Guest Contributor: Dan Retzer, Managing Director and Chief Technology Officer, XSP That coexistence between the ISO 15022 and 20022 messaging standards presents challenges to the producers and consumers of financial data is without question. These challenges, however, also yield opportunities for solutions providers, vendors and consultants that possess demonstrated expertise in both standards. This juxtaposition
Dodd-Frank
A LEI not from Hawaii
Guest Contributors: Nigel Jenkinson and Irina S. Leonova, Financial Stability Board The recently published FSB report entitled ‘A Global Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) for Financial Markets’ started with an introduction: “There is widespread agreement among the public authorities and financial industry participants on the merits of establishing a uniform global system for legal entity identification.
Guest Blog
Capital Markets and Expensive Errors
Guest Contributor: Joseph DiNardo, Senior Product Manager, Bonaire Software Many capital markets firms have been asking themselves the following: “How confident is my expense management team in the accuracy and validation of trade expense costs when paying vendor invoices?” – or – “Have we compared trade execution fees across vendors for optimal pricing?” These questions stem
Guest Blog
Big Mistake Making Reconciliation Tool of Choice Excel
Guest Contributor: Neil Vernon, Product Development Director, Gresham Computing Gresham Computing is one of the sponsors of FTF’s 7th Annual Reconciliations & Exception Management Conference. When I looked through the list of sponsors there was one really noticeable omission. The vendor that supplies the software that undertakes the majority of reconciliations in every financial firm
Compliance
Can Cube or OLAP Technology Prove to be the New Disruptive Force in Risk Management Solutions?
Guest Contributor: By David Priestly, CEO of OpenLink’s CubeIntelligence Division Every so often, markets become dominated by so called “disruptive technology” solutions that offer a genuine order of magnitude improvement in functionality, speed, flexibility and cost. Cubes or OLAP (online analytical processing), which are the cornerstone of all good business intelligence platforms, are threatening traditional
Financial Technology
Finding Creative Ways to Take Out Costs
Guest Contributor: Nick Jackson, Partner, Capco Financial institutions continue to face tremendous pressures to reduce costs. Since the credit crisis began, banks have reduced headcount, re–engineered processes and introduced LEAN and Six Sigma methodologies in an effort to lower costs and maintain or grow revenue. Most banks have exhausted the low-hanging fruit cost-reduction efforts available
Data Management
The LEI: A Building Block for Enhanced Data and Risk Management
Guest Contributor: Marty Williams, Vice President, Reference Data Product Development, Interactive Data Corporation’s Pricing and Reference Data Business The introduction of a standardized Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) could deliver significant benefits beyond allowing regulators to more accurately monitor systemic risk. While we are at the beginning of a journey toward what could become a global
