Back Office Management
Background :
The client is a mid-size fund investing in the US Fixed Income market. It was brought together by a team of professionals with the over 50 years of joint experience in the Financial Services Industry. The fund specializes in algorithmic trading of fixed income securities. As a result the fund relies on its technology infrastructure more than anything else to keep them up and running.
Business Problem :
The client wanted to improve its Back-Office process. Among the main tasks of a conventional fund’s back-office operations are trade clearing, trade & P&L reconciliation, resolving breaks, dealing with prime brokers &counterparties. The client wanted to reduce costs, free up its highly skilled resources and make the back-office error free.
Opportunity :
Understanding the domain and the kind of products the client was trading & investing in was critical to charting out the business process for the back office. Freeing up the clients resources meant suggesting a complete outsourcing solution. This required hiring & managing a team offsite that would have an understanding of the business & products, possess language skills to speak directly with prime brokers &counterparties, critical thinking skills, excellent execution skills with great attention to details. The team was required to be able to work under pressure and understand the priority of issues that might arise.
Solution :
Our senior team members spent some time on-site to understand & document the client’s back-office functions. A team of highly skilled individuals was trained off-site by simulating the different tasks. After they started execution of the basic functions, we simulated various situations for the team, such as:
- Creating artificial trade/P&L breaks for them to solve.
- Pressure situations to grasp their understanding of the issues.
- Mock phone calls were conducted to hone their language and presentation skills.
Benefits :
Our team was able to deliver value to the client in the following ways:
Effective Resource Use :
Highly skilled resources were able to free considerable amounts of time which was spent in executing simple day to day activities.
Cost Effective :
In addition to the cost benefit realized from the extra time which their more expensive on-site resources freed up, the client was able to assign additional research oriented tasks to the off-site team to further improve their back office working model and streamline their daily tasks.