Guest Contributor: Cheryl Nash, President, Investment Services, Fiserv 2012 was a turnaround year for the wealth management industry. Coming out of the prior crisis, last year was a period of regaining control for advisory firms — revisiting practices, revamping processes, implementing new technology and restoring investors’ faith— to regain growth and better serve clients. Firms
Back-Office
Lean and Efficient Best Practices: Utilities, Shared Services and Centres of Excellence in Reconciliations
Guest Contributor: David Penney, Executive Vice President , SmartStream Technologies Ltd Reconciliations are an essential part of back office processing throughout financial services and markets. Experience with our customers leads to the conclusion that Internal Utilities are already well established with a Centre of Excellence as best practice. I am convinced Shared Service Centres are
Guest Blog
Why Not T+0?
Guest Contributor: Jeremiah J. O’Connell, Chief Executive Officer & senior principal, Jeremiah Associates LLC The global industry is once again exploring the ideal settlement cycle. This has been a focus since an earlier change to T+3. The motivation for change is that a shorter interval of time between trade-settlement dates reduces the risks and costs
Compliance
What Can Hedge Fund Administrators Learn from Madonna?
Guest Contributor: George Michaels, CEO, G2 FinTech One could say Madonna owes a great deal of her multi-decade success to her ability to “reinvent” herself and keep pace with the ever-changing music scene. The hedge fund administration industry could learn a thing or two from this strategy. Hedge fund “admins” are perfectly poised to capitalize
Guest Blog
Areas of Focus for Private Equity Managers in 2013
Guest Contributor: Amelia Stoj, Vice President of HedgeOp Compliance, an IMS Group company As it is 2013, it is important for SEC registered private equity managers to focus on upcoming filing deadlines and on-going compliance issues for the year ahead. All registered private equity managers should note that there are two large filing deadlines looming
Guest Blog
Key Current Challenges of the Asset Management Industry and Operational Answers
Guest Contributor: Peter Ellis, General Manager EMEA, BI-SAM Investment management is under great pressure. Volatile markets make accurate forecasting impossible and the growth in regulation increases the cost of doing business for all participants. Investment managers must find new ways of working to achieve more with less. Technology has a vital role to play in
Guest Blog
Should OTFs be Included in the Equities Market?
Guest Contributor: Simmy Grewal, Senior Analyst, Aite Group The 2008 financial crisis and the May 6, 2010 “flash crash” have spurred politicians and regulators across the globe to instigate regulation that will protect the safety of our capital markets. Financial crisis aside, the European capital markets regulation, the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (dubbed MiFID
Guest Blog
A 2012 Tax Reporting Challenge You Might Have Underestimated
Guest Contributor: Stevie D. Conlon, senior director and tax counsel, Wolters Kluwer Financial Services It seems investment tax issues continue to become more complex, and this year is no exception for the financial services industry—particularly given the multiple facets of the cost basis reporting law. One of the law’s requirements is that issuers of securities
Guest Blog
Reconciliation is the Key to Controlling OTC Derivative Exposures for the Buy Side
Guest Blog Contributors: Mary Harris (left), Business Manager TriResolve and Susan Hinko (right), Head of Industry Relations TriOptima The new year brings with it an onslaught of requirements for managing OTC derivative portfolios, cleared and uncleared alike; and also presents new challenges with parallel tracks for processing and collateralizing the transactions. While standardized credit and interest rate
Guest Blog
Community Sourcing in Financial Services PR: You Bring the Pizza, I’ll Bring the Pop
Guest Contributor: Steph Johnson, Head of North America, Aspectus PR Brian Prentice, a research vice president with Gartner Group’s emerging trends and technologies group in Sydney, Australia, was an early adopter of the term ‘community sourcing.’ It describes a software development and deployment model where participating organizations make their internal application and development resources available
