Traditionally trade processing has been the responsibility of the investment manager. Commercial solutions have been devised for confirming and matching trades with brokers and the market as well as settling trades with custodians. However, when this responsibility is passed to a third party a demand is introduced for trade management oversight and control across the Investment Manager to Outsource Provider boundary; a boundary that is tightly controlled by messaging standards and service levels.
Good solutions provide appropriate visibility and controls over the trade despatch and acknowledgement process and monitor this against outsourcer’s service levels. They allow appropriate levels of message correction and reprocessing as well as quality assurance to reduce exception handling. At a technical level the same solution is routinely required to convert internal messaging standards of order management systems to those of the outsource provider and do so quickly and with a guaranteed delivery.
Is the time right for a market solution to step forward and address this need?
Note: This opinion piece was first published by Knadel Limited prior to the Catalyst-Sionic merger
