The middle office of Raymond James’ Equity Capital Markets group needed to make improvements in the operational control and processing of block trades.
Struggling with legacy systems and manual processes, employees of the middle office at financial holding company Raymond James’ Equity Capital Markets (ECM) division were finding it next to impossible to do their jobs in a timely and efficient manner.
Since implementing financial technology provider GBST’s pre-settlement processing engine GBST Syn~ however, says the ECM middle office has seen a marked improvement in a number of areas that used to be performed manually, according to Susan Horn, SVP of ECM Operations at Raymond James.
The Raymond James spokesperson says that before making the change, the ECM middle office recognized that it needed to make improvements in straight through processing (STP), operational control of client block trades as well as the timeliness and transparency of processing.
Raymond James met with GBST several times throughout 2012, and in October of that year a business discovery engagement commenced. It took teams at the firm and at the vendor about a year to successfully implement the solution.
Now that it’s in place GBST Syn~ gives the ECM middle office the ability to fully “automate electronic client trade advisements and allocations, netting and trade compression, and centralization across a number of disparate systems,” Horn says.
“The visibility into the details of the business are great,” Horn says. “Having everything in one system is just fantastic.”
After the GBST Syn~ system went live on July 15, 2014, approximately 35 employees in the firm’s ECM middle office use the GBST software, a Raymond James spokesperson says. The end-users at the firm have reported that the system is yielding positive results via the accuracy and timeliness of functions performed through GBST Syn~.
Horn says some of the systems and manual processes replaced were mostly related to non-vanilla trading activity, including:
- Calculations for ECM trade commission distributions, adjustments and post-trade date;
- Identification of data for the reconciliation of inventory positions;
- Trade creation for non-vanilla trades and transactions;
- The amending and re-creation of trades to accommodate corrections and cancelations;
- Middle office reference data and business rules maintenance, including spreadsheets and manual lists;
- Requests for new client trading accounts to be set up at a firm level
When Raymond James made the decision to automate its ECM middle office processes, GBST Syn~ was the only solution provider it considered for the overhaul, Horn says.
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