Investment Operations Officer
Confidential
Total years of experience :17 years, 7 Months
INVESTMENT OPERATIONS - EQUITY, FIXED INCOME & TREASURY, ILLIQUID AND ALTERNATIVE ASSET CLASSES.
Process data acquisition, when required and in coordination with investment/finance, with external parties (GPs/Funds/Portfolio Companies/External data providers)
Investigate errors in financial data, identify root causes and follow established process to resolve the issue with the relevant parties involved
Ensure the integrity of department data received via excel based templates and further developing the current data governance framework
Ensure and monitor data completeness, quality, accuracy and availability for all investment data
Generate reports and ensure the completeness and accuracy of reports produced.
Broad knowledge of fund performance measurement.
Liaise with external data providers and other third parties as required
Maintain sound policies and procedures
Escalate any data issues via an established process to vendors/ providers.
Comprehensive knowledge of all factors relating to Data Governance
Manage and develop key internal relationships within the department
Manage and develop key external relationships with external data providers
Support senior colleagues in the preparation of presentations to senior management within the Department
Work with legal consultants and senior management to complete the Investment Management Agreement (IMA) sign-off procedure.
Review and payment of (fund) management fees to external fund managers.
Documentations and Operations support on fund manager / broker on boarding.
Assist custodian in tax filing/ reclaim procedures in external markets such as Europe / US.
New account set up.
Monitor brokerage commissions on external mandates.
Process capital-call payments and ensure funds availability.
Invoice / Management fee payments
Capturing of redemptions / distributions.
Portfolio transitions.
MIDDLE OFFICE AND BACK OFFICE FUNCTIONS:
Checks and verifies trade details as per trade execution against the broker confirmation obtained. In case of trade discrepancies, resolves these with the respective external party and processes trades accordingly.
Trade support and settlement.
Process and instigate SWIFT, fax or email messages to brokers, correspondent, counterparty and custodian banks on settlement related issues - (MT 541/543s)
SSI Set up and periodic review - ensures that Standard Settlement Instruction (SSI) is set up / up-to-date, and changes are incorporated accordingly.
REFERENCE DATA MANAGEMENT AND PRICING
Security Set up - Equity, Fixed Income and Derivative products.
Index / variable rate processing.
Benchmark data uploads.
Futures and Options on Futures and IRS set up.
Monitor and update daily prices from vendors.
FX rates review and processing.
Resolve security related exceptions
Reconcile prices from difference data sources.
Advanced level experience in Reference Data module of Bloomberg.
CASH MANAGEMENT AND RECONCILIATION
Reconciling actual payment with the bank balances
Ensuring movement of funds across banks and accounts within the accounts facilitating payments to the external fund managers.
Daily management of cash positions to ensure best returns and funds availability to meet monthly pay-out commitments.
Release payment / fund movement instructions (SWIFT message types - 103/202/304/300/320/541/543 and free format).
INVESTIGATION AND RESOLUTION
Reviews and investigates all outstanding standard and non-standard processing and settlement issues related to external parties like custodian, correspondent banks and internal parties like Finance Department.
Initiates and take necessary steps to resolve them and follows up with direct action to resolve them.
Trade capture in internal ledger systems.
Trade monitoring to address any settlement issues. (T+0 and post-settlement).
Monitor corporate actions and dividends receipts / accruals.
Equity and Fixed Income. (On contract)
Responsibilities included:
Trade and transition support, cash management, reconciliations, SWIFT
support for all external mandates governed Investment Departments.
Monitoring and verifying processed trades (Equities, Bonds, Repos, OTCs,
Futures, Options, Collaterals, etc.).
Processing straight forward trades, trade matching and reconciliations,
external fund transfers and handling transitions,
SWIFT MTs creation and RMA setup.
Investigating exceptions and mismatches with custodians / FCMs / OTC
counterparties.
Ensuring that all trades externally settled by custodians / FCMs / OTC
counterparties and internally booked on the internal systems in an accurate
and timely manner.
Assist in setting up and maintenance of secure communication. Establish
review process to enhance service delivery
Ensure effective coordination in maintaining an operational risk
management framework across the division and ensuring compliance with
all due diligence to mitigate operational and third party risks
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Suggest system enhancements and process changes and ensure preparation
of process flow maps, system enhancement change requests, arrange
necessary UAT for routine upgrades and STP initiatives
Assist in updating static database of all external mandates and custodians /
FCMs / OTC counterparties to reflect an up-to-date management
information
Assist in establishing a periodic review of counterparties reporting
mechanism and evaluate to enhance STP
Support and maintain the framework, policies, tools and processes for
operations risk management across the division in line with departments
objectives
Co-ordinate payment of fund fees and expenses
Operations support to equity, fixed income and treasury products
Trade & Transitions Support:
Ensure transactions for all transaction types within the Fixed Income &
Treasury, Equities & Alternative Investments external mandates (Equities,
Bonds, Repos, OTCs, Futures, Options, Collaterals) are received and
processed in appropriate systems on a timely manner
Ensure market price data is received from the independent market source
and updated in the relevant systems
Monitor daily activity statement from FCMs and OTC counterparties, verify
for completeness, and availability.
Report any highlighted unauthorized trade per trading agreement by
external mandates to Ops. Risk / Compliance.
Investigate and follow up trade capture related issues (e.g., late or
inaccurate processing, creation of new contracts / securities /
counterparties / SSIs ) by liaising with internal and external counterparties
to ensure smooth execution
Assist in necessary setup for new mandates are in place (by reference data
management) before the commencement of trading activity by the new
external mandate.
Prepare instructions & arrange transfer lists to custodians / FCMs via SWIFT
/ secure communication protocols to effect inter-fund transitions, cash
movements and advise any standing instructions based on requests from
Investment Departments.
Process securities transfers between existing mandates or to / from
transition accounts within the same custodian or across various custodians
on the advice of Investment Departments / Transition Management Team
and ensure that these are booked in an accurate and timely manner.
Cash Management:
Review margin call request from FCMs and prepare funds movements.
Assist in execution of daily margin settlement instructions to custodian.
Ensure fund movement to the hedge funds administrators.
Monitor cash flow, arrange funds for security settlement and margin calls.
Forecast daily cash requirements and execute daily financing decisions.
Cash liquidity management.
Reconciliation:
Ensure all reconciliation breaks are handled in a timely manner. Assist in the
position balances with FCM statements for each CTA
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Ensure the generation of Commodity Reports for MIS
Creation and implementation of daily MIS report to min
SWIFT Support:
Cash Recs. Position Recs and Transaction (Trade) Recs.
Exception management, research and control and MIS.
FX and cash management operations.
Tarde management tasks - daily reconciliation, account maintenance,
establishing broker accounts, setting up SSIs.
Internal audit and RCSA documentation.
Inter-system reconciliation.
Subject matter level expertise on automated/manual reconciliations.
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Independently handled a team of 12 members.
People Management, including staff development and formal appraisal
process.
Development of KPIs /MIS and management matrix.
Exception reporting, management and Investigation.
Formulation of operational procedures, SLA reviews, and policy
documentations
Overseeing team quality assurance efforts and various performance
matrices.
Played lead roles in in-house compliance and quality assurance efforts -
with internal and external auditors to ensure regulatory compliance (FSA
and SEC regulations)
Migration of new clients (Prime brokers):
Dealing with Front office on new clients and their specific requirements.
Intermediary role between Front office and ops teams
Set up of accounts and testing of reconciliation messages.
Follow up of the operational incidents reported.
Tracking changes or new needs requested by the Client service teams.
Projects summary:
Client on boarding: Independently handled a year long project of TLM on-
boarding of 2000+ client accounts in 2012, which went through the entire
year. I led and managed the operational side (custody) of this business
acquisition.
Actively involved in more than 30 external fund manager and custodian
transitions - including withdrawals and terminations.
TLM upgrade and data base Split: played an active role as an SME in three
TLM upgrades. Developed functional test scripts and was a lead tester in
UAT environments creating two different TLM instances for cash and stock.
TLM automation - Led an in house project in improving STP rates in TLM
and resulted in an overall increase of 14% improvement.
Intra-day Reconciliation: Actively involved in one of the biggest projects in
the bank, building and testing cash intra-day reconciliation. I’m playing key
role in coordinating and leading the intra-day cash reconciliation of major
custody markets. This involves testing of new message types, automation,
procedure roll out, reconciliation time lines, SLAs, SWIFT enhancements
etc.
Legacy exception management: Led a project of cleaning up of legacy
exceptions with an average age band of 1000+ days.
TLM Pass list clean up and Dash board design: Worked closely with IT in the
clean up of redundant passes to enhance the system performance, and
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assisted in development and testing new dash boards to optimize
reconciliation.
Worked as business SME to guide IT in designing Capacity enhancement:
Hands on expertise on performance enhancement programs, in creating an
additional 10% capacity from existing resources.
Level 1 & Level 2 Research: Played a key role in migration of additional
research and value added services to internal business units.
SWIFT message enhancements: Worked various internal and external
groups in improving referencing in reconciliation SWIFT messages
(940s/950s) to improve the STP rates.
Global Custody and FX Operations
Responsibilities included:
Inter-bank Smart stream TLM based reconciliation - Investment Banking
Custody and FX operations. (bank Vs bank and bank Vs client)
Custodian transitions.
Intraday and end of day reconciliations (MT900/910/940/950)
TLM Reconciliation version 2.0 2.5, 2.6, 2.7 and TLM Recon Admin. - testing,
migration and implementation
Short selling and prime brokerage rec set up and reconciliation.
On boarding of new clients / business in multiple markets.
Account set up - TLM account configurations and set up ( static data)
Thorough knowledge of the functional aspects of TLM - front end and back
end.
Straight Through Processing (STP) enhancements and Automation
Good knowledge of SWIFT messages and various message types.
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