FTF News also offers FinTech updates from Watson Wheatley, Nasdaq and Broadridge Financial Solutions.
New Portal Works with IHS Markit’s KY3P
Data and analytics vendor IHS Markit has launched the Vendor Management Portal (VMP), a solution to help end-user firms with support for vendor risk-tiering and vendor management workflow, officials say
The effort combines VMP with the vendor’s KY3P due diligence service to offer a system to “centralize the management of third-party relationships, assess and monitor third-party risk and perform vendor due diligence,” officials say.
Vendor officials say the VMP provides:
- Onboarding workflow: Standardized vendor onboarding requests initiate workflow to determine the necessary due diligence and approvals;
- Calculation of inherent risk: Inherent risk for the vendor product or service is calculated using rules configured by the user, based on due diligence data and other relationship details;
- Ongoing risk-based oversight: Based on inherent risk, the system auto generates and schedules oversight activities; and
- Off-boarding: Provides both rule-based and ad hoc off-boarding using a simple workflow to ensure that the appropriate controls are applied.
“Investing in infrastructure to enable vendor lifecycle management including the identification and mitigation of risk is essential to us and the industry more broadly, and we were pleased to contribute to the design of the Vendor Management Portal,” says Richard Blore, managing director at Goldman Sachs, in a prepared statement.
Market research firm Celent reports that “a major bank can have more than 20,000 vendor relationships. With so many dependencies, risk oversight and standardizing controls over a large and diverse population of service providers is a major challenge. Failure to manage vendor relationships effectively creates significant operational, financial, cyber and reputational risks,” officials say.
Watson Wheatley Launches Reconciliation-as-a-Service
Watson Wheatley Financial Systems, which specializes in securities reconciliation software, has launched its reconciliation-as-a-service.
The new offering is “currently live with its first client; a large emerging markets equities asset manager,” the vendor reports, calling the new service “heavily automated, bounded by strict SLA’s [service level agreements] and provides regular reporting for oversight of the process.”
The service is designed to “save on manpower while still providing … best practice reconciliation,” Watson Wheatley says, specifying that a “full audit trail, sign off process and the elimination of spreadsheets is achieved by … this hosted application. Multiple types of reconciliations are being performed and performance analytics being delivered back to the client.”
The company characterizes itself as a “reconciliation system vendor with worldwide clients including hedge funds, long-only asset managers and commodities traders.”
Nasdaq Joins Systematic Internalizer Registry Data Group
Nasdaq has joined the systematic internalizer (SI) registry provided by SmartStream, which notes that its reference data utility (RDU) “provides a hub for SIs to register financial instruments in a centralised database through their APA,” or approved trading venue, according to a SmartStream statement.
Other participants in the registry include Bloomberg, Deutsche Boerse, NEX Regulatory Reporting, TRADEcho, Tradeweb and Trax, according to the statement, which also notes that the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II (MiFID II) requires that industry participants identify “whether trading counterparties are SIs for the financial instrument that they are trading, so that they can determine which counterparty must report the trade. The problem is acute for market participants as no mechanism is defined in the MIFID II framework to collect the necessary data to determine which counterparty should report.”
Financial services firms are required to comply with the SI regime as of the beginning of September 2018.
The SmartStream RDU “acts as a processing agent for its participants selected data sources; sourcing, validating and cross-referencing data using market best [practices] so that these processes do not need to be duplicated in every financial institution,” according to the SmartStream statement.
Broadridge Acquires MackayWilliams
Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc., a fintech specialist, has “expanded its global market intelligence business” by acquiring MackayWilliams, a European fund market-and-research firm, according to a Broadridge statement, which notes that the acquisition will “combine Broadridge’s fund data and analytics solutions with MackayWilliams’ … insight into European mutual fund trends, brand perceptions and fund selector behavior offering clients a more integrated and holistic view of retail and institutional markets across regions.”
MackayWilliams provides “proprietary sentiment and brand data from over 1,000 annual fund buyer interviews,” the statement notes.
Broadridge points out that it has “invested in expanding its solutions with several acquisitions in recent years including certain assets of the Thomson Reuters Lipper Fiduciary Services and Competitive Intelligence businesses, Spence Johnson, a provider of institutional data and analytics that tracks over $22 trillion of institutional assets, and Morningstar’s fund board 15(c) advisory business.”
Broadridge tallies “more than US$4 billion in annual revenue,” and employs approximately 10,000 full-time associates in 16 countries.
MackayWilliams, which spotlights its quarter-century history of developing “data and insights on European industry trends,” operates from offices in London and Berlin.
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