More and more, banks and other financial services firms are applying reconciliation technologies and services to their clients’ financial products, which are increasingly more than the traditional realm of equities.
To do so, many securities firms have to do more due diligence, risk control, reconciliation and shadow accounting for their clients’ assets rather than leave it all to their prime brokers and custodians, says Paul Chung, vice president, client services, Electra Information Systems.
Thus reconciliation providers have experienced over the years an investment management community that needs more services and support as they take on these additional responsibilities for their clients’ assets, Chung says.
This means more work for securities operations teams.
In fact, more money managers are “investing in more complex, exotic instruments and that has put a lot of pressure on their operations teams to actually handle these very complicated instruments and to value them and manage them properly for their clients,” Chung says.
“So, I think this has really been driven by the investment community and we’ve been fortunate at Electra to actually offer and support reconciliation for very, very complex instruments,” Chung adds. “So, gone are the days where the investment managers are just investing at equities. They’re looking at much more diverse and complex instruments.” For instance, financial services firms new need help with the reconciliation of futures instruments and credit default swaps, he says.
Electra is a provider of post-trade processing solutions for reconciliation, data collection and transformation, trade matching and settlement and client fee billing. The company won the 2017 Best Reconciliation Solution honor of the FTF News Technology Innovation Awards. The winners of the annual FTF Awards competition are chosen by qualified voters who are industry participants.
Chung was interviewed during the FTF Awards gala celebration June 20 held at the Dream Downtown Hotel in New York City.
CREDITS:
Video Production: Janene Knox and William J. Poznanski, Jr.
Interview conducted by: Eugene Grygo, chief content officer, FTF News
Co-Producers: Sarah Hathaway, vice president, Financial Technologies Forum (FTF) and Eugene Grygo
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