Research data: Your secret weapon in the exception management fight

What does your operations team do when a break occurs? Typically, the process goes something like this:

• Team alerted to the break, needs to investigate and identify the root cause.
• Team requires access to information such as failed trades and corporate actions to figure out what has happened and why.
• Team spends multiple staff hours trying to gather this information from emails, spreadsheets and external data sources often stored within siloed systems and platforms across the organisation.
• Involvement is required from multiple back-office and middle-office teams, effort is duplicated; errors and omissions occur and need to be corrected.
• Team finally has the information required and is able to identify the root cause of the break.

It’s easy to see where the pain exists in this process, and largely speaking, it’s not the root-cause analysis itself that is the problem. It’s the time taken to gather the research data – the information that holds the key to understanding why a break has occurred, and fixing it.

So why is this so painful? Partly due to, as previously mentioned, the siloed nature of firms’ operations. When you lack one true, consistent data source, have information held in different platforms or systems that can’t talk to each other, or need to gather data from a range of external sources – and that data often comes in different formats – it’s no surprise that this exercise is extremely time-consuming.

Overcoming these challenges will certainly help speed up your investigations process. But the real power lies in combining this information with your reconciliations data in order to automate as much of the investigations process as possible.

With Gresham, the process we outlined above, looks like this:
• Team alerted to the break, needs to investigate and identify the root cause.
• Team requires access to information such as failed trades and corporate actions to work out what has happened and why.
• Gresham provides access to a research data repository which serves as a single point of reference for all your failed trades, corporate actions, securities lending and collateral
• Our Control for investment management solution leverages patented technology that intelligently integrates transactions holdings and cash. The software then links post-reconciliation breaks with the underlying cause of the break via data stored within the research repository. This eliminates the need to search for the answers contained in emails or download information from a bank website.

And the results for your team include:
• Accelerated investigations into the root-cause of breaks.
• Reduced manual intervention and errors.
• Increased efficiency, freeing up your teams to focus only on true exceptions and other value-adding tasks.
• Cross-functional collaboration and transparency throughout post-trade operations, eliminating duplication of effort across teams.

Combining your research and reconciliation data is one of the most powerful things you can do in terms of enhancing operational efficiency. To discover how we can help, contact us here.


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