Senior Associate/ Manager
State Street Bank & Trust
Total years of experience :8 years, 1 Months
• Managing a team of trainees and administrators, and assisting with their day to day queries.
• Authorising high volume/ extremely high value (>$million) payments across multiple banking platforms (B signatory)
• Checking trainees'/ administrators’ work and sign off, delegating work as appropriate to them.
• Ensuring compliance with all company policies and procedures, and keeping abreast of any amendments.
• Monitoring PEPs, checks on high risk companies, countries, individuals using WorldCheck and other proprietary software, communicating with risk, compliance, ethics and other departments when high risk entities are identified as clients/ suppliers/ third parties.
• Sanction screening and clearing any PEP hits.
• Involved in new business setup, amending schedule of services to agree fees to client, agreeing fees with client through rounds of negotiation.
• Identifying when to escalate issues, working in a global team, co-ordinating via email, phone, Webex, working to tight deadlines and ensuring all are aware of progress, stumbling blocks.
• Project work (confidential).
• Extensive legal agreement review and logging of key dates, deliverables and further actions required.
• Invoicing clients and debt collection, ensuring debt never went over 30 days by active chasing and by keeping good client relations.
• Consistent review (quarterly or per trigger event such as change of staff at client or PEP hit) of static data and signing off and ensuring full client data file completion.
• Working with centres of excellence teams around the world to ensure all SSI details are updated on Investran software, and updating internal control spreadsheets.
• Review and complete update of static data held for all clients that were being sold to another Fund Administration firm.
• Operator Review files setup and maintenance (for unregulated collective investment schemes).
• Checking call notices/ distribution notices/ official statements and sending these out to clients.
• Extensive contact with clients (10 +) as their main contact with State Street and to complete their requests required or as per SLA and delegate out as appropriate. Communicate with banks to set up accounts, liaison with new business departments compliance and legal departments to complete work effectively..
• Attending board meetings and assisting in the mock up of the minutes, using Companies House and filing the necessary forms online/ paper format.
• 70% of client work involved real estate clients, 20% private equity, 10% debt and other sectors.
• Being aware of new regulations, and extensively using regulatory bodies to check and conduct due diligence (FCA website, European regulators’ websites, OFAC sanction lists).
• Write up of escalation memos for high risk entities/ individuals that were clients, following up with team members and diarising monthly updates. Underlying full checks conducted using various publicly available information from the internet/ Wikipedia/ Reuters/ Bloomberg and internal software. Further advice sought from high risk compliance, due diligence and senior management teams.
• Maintained all Investor Relations - sent all fund quarterly/ annual reports (in 70+ funds), news updates, press releases and other correspondence to investors. Contacted investors on a daily basis with regards to funding issues, investment opportunities, expected realisations in fund investments, when a fund was in carry (as some vehicles are structured to receive carry proceeds only) and to build a good rapport. Responded to queries in a timely manner.
• Attended Investor Presentations (3-4 per year) and represented the firm. Produced written detailed notes indicating portfolio company performance, future realisation expectations and fundraising activities. These reports were then presented to the firm and received very good reviews. Also networked at events effectively, to ensure the firm was well represented.
• Analysed fund performance for the CEO after receiving quarterly/ annual reports (where time permitting after reviewing them), looking at multiples, DPI; on a company basis, the change in EBITDA/ revenue, the percentage invested represented by the portfolio company. My analysis was passed on to Senior Management and various other members of the team(s) as required.
• Attended legal seminars on industry hot topics (AIFMD/ FATCA/ Volcker Rule/ Dodd Frank Act.
• Set up new investment vehicles for new investments in private equity funds. This involved setting up the vehicle as an English LLP with Companies House, creating the LLP deed for the new LLP and executing it, liaison with the fund and their legal team/ advisors in relation to relevant subscription booklets/ documents to be filled in, AML/ CDD documents provided ready for submission along with sub docs before the deadline/ fund close, appointment of new members with Companies House, updating all the relevant Excel spreadsheets to track investments in the fund/ for distributions/ for tax and regulatory purposes, creating the new fund on TNR.
• Companies House: Ensured that all 22 of annual (statutory) returns were paid on time and accurately represented the Partners and Partnership, in addition to filing change of details
• (address)/ appointment of member/ corporate member/ termination of member forms and other such forms as required during the course of the year (the number of forms amounts in the 100s).
• Cash manager - Daily reconciliation of overall net cash. This involved daily analysis of calculating back to GBP the balances held in 7 different fund currencies. Predicting cash inflows (from drawdowns of Partners, payments in for costs owing) and cash outflows (for capital call payments, taxes due, statutory representation costs, distributions). Managed the overall level of cash.
• Project Manager - General Ledger Reconciliation. This was a 2 year project, that involved a complete data cleanse of all accounting entries from 2002 to the current date. I devised a time plan and set up weekly progress meetings, attended board meetings and presented my findings, delegated tasks to other team members, set about rectifying any issues, recorded all details on a newly created audit file(s), completed this in July 2012.
• Responsible for bank reconciliations & actively monitoring the accounts for cashflow purposes.
• Responsible for all sales ledger duties on a daily basis for one property (raising invoices to tenants, of which there were over 700, posting receipts, credit notes, journals daily), supervising a temp with this activity & one other member of staff with any ongoing queries.
• Responsible for the implementation of Worldpay to APB & Excel. This involved extensively testing & monitoring the reports to ensure the default parameters were correct, analysis & monitoring of the income from Worldpay to ensure it could be interpreted automatically (using complex V-lookup formulae) by Excel & that the VAT, payment type, individual could all be recognised, saved the Worldpay income reports on a daily basis & worked with the IT support & Worldpay support teams to resolve any issues with the software.
• Responsible for the majority of the testing for the newly created Reservations system. This involved testing financial as well as non - financial data & coordinating colleagues’ work. Ensured that all the information contained within the system was financially accurate (this involved checking room rates, income over a period, paying using dummy credit card details, VAT costs, VAT codes, descriptions & all other qualitative data that needed to be checked), held meetings with team members and IT team to discuss work required.
• Responsible for ensuring that daily financial exports from the Online Reservations system were correct (also linked to Worldpay), were saved daily & could be read by Excel using v-lookups. Ensured that all the VAT codes, descriptions, row lengths, file & exports size, inputting of tenancy references were all correct and identified any issues immediately and sought to resolve ongoing issues through extensive contact with the IT Support team. These exports were then imported on to APB.
• Responsible for all Group Debtors (total income >£4 million/year) & creating and sending off invoices to the client by email. Liaised internally with the Reservations team, law team & client concerning contracts needed for invoicing, actively chased debts by telephone & email (& sending reminders to Groups with high value debts that could upset cashflow).
• Prepared domestic & international CHAPs transfers (emphasis on IBAN, SWIFT, intermediary details, and any local information required) for refunds of damage deposits of tenants - including £30, 000).
• Assisted with Auditors’ interim & actual audit requirements (analysed & provided proof of rental figures, provided contracts & Group income files, purchase ledger invoices).
• Analysed the capital/ revenue expenditure, VAT, rental income, other income & any cash sweeps on a daily basis for a £0.5 billion fund. This was sent to the client by12pm to enable calculation of the overall fund value.
• Bank reconciliation of the real estate fund’s operational account (£0.5 billion fund)
• Posted transactions to Horizon (invoices/ receipts/ cash account transactions etc).
• Covered (for one month) the entire Property Accounts payable for three funds, with payments by CHAPs, BACs, cheques (ranging from £100 - £350, 000) - utllising Business Objects software to print remittance advices.
• Reconciled the quarterly rents (due at the end of March 08) from Horizon to the invoicing conducted by the property agent (30 properties with 1, 000 units).
• Updated the electronic cashbooks of three funds (circa £4.5 billion) on a daily basis.
• Organised cash sweeps for two fund accounts to maximise returns, organised daily CHAPS.
• Liaison with Fund Managers, Property Agents, Surveyors, & building relationships with them.
• Checked VAT reports (to ensure VAT was treated correctly on the system).
• Assisted with the preparation of completion statements.
Same as previous role at Blackstone Group.
• Oversaw the accounts payable process.
• Oversaw credit control duties (achieving £1.1 receipts in June 2007)
Usual Finance Assistant duties
Mechanical Engineering with Business Finance degree
A levels - Maths B, Chemistry C, Physics D AS Levels - Geography C, General Studies C
11 GCSE’s grades A-C including English Language B & Mathematics A