Middle-office operations for asset managers

Overview

The biggest challenges facing most middle-office operations teams post-pandemic are employee attrition and finding top talent to replace them. The increasing number of innovative and complex/alternative asset-class investment strategies amid growing data management issues has only complicated the situation and diverted management focus.

At Acuity, we strategically partner with our clients to work as an extension of their teams. Our ability to hire, train and retain top finance talent remains our main differentiating factor. Our firm’s capital markets research heritage has helped us understand and manage requirements of middle-office operations teams and enhanced our middle office services. Our ability to run cost-effective and stable middle-office operations has enabled our clients to achieve their operational alpha goals.

Our experienced analysts provide support on several fund accounting and shadow accounting activities, such as trade processing, reconciliations, corporate actions, pricing/valuation and NAV calculations, for simple securities to complex structured products across global markets. We also provide support on capital activity, administrative tasks (including invoicing support), investment management regulatory reporting and portfolio management.

Middle and Back office operations support with wide asset class coverage such as Equity and Fixed Income (Public/Private Equity, Bonds, Public/Private Credit and SPACs), Derivatives (Options, Swaps, Forwards and Futures) and Loans (CLO, CMBS/CRE, Unsecured loans, ABS/MBS, Project Finance and RMBS)

Who we serve

Asset Managers
Hedge Funds Solutions
Private Wealth Managers
Fund Consultants
Pension Advisors

Portfolio operations support – selected capabilities

Fund accounting support

Transaction/trade processing
- Trade confirmation
- Identifying and fixing trade failures
- Manual booking of complex trades
- Counterparty confirmation
- Cash flow monitoring
- Liquidity management

Reconciliation
- Reconciliation of cash and positions
- Reconciliation of custody/broker/trustee vs fund admin books
- Automated and manual reconciliation
- Clearing breaks in a timely manner
- Report publication

Corporate actions and reference data
- Creating and maintaining security and event databases/security master functions
- Corporate action feed monitoring
- Comparing data against data sources for accuracy
- Corporate action processing on tools
- Modelling securities not supported by the platform

Valuations/pricing
- Ensuring 100% price availability
- Comparing data from different data sources for accuracy
- Identifying price inconsistencies, justifying price jumps/stale prices, etc.
- Manually updating prices of OTC products
- Producing reports in line withprice volatility

NAV calculation
- Recording capital flow received from transfer agency
- Recording accruals and income from treasury team
- Integrating price/corporate action feed and checking O/S breaks
- Computing fees (performance, management fees, etc.) and invoicing
- Calculating/generating NAV packs and IRR

Capital activity

- Client onboarding and bookkeeping
- Subscription and redemption processing
- Dividend reinvestment
- Switching (within the same AMC)

Admin support

- Invoice database management
- Cash confirmation from liquidity teams. external vendor coordination for fee payment and client servicing
- Managing collateral, margin, cash, income and expenses of the fund
- MIS reporting

Investment management regulatory reporting

- Form PF reports
- AIFMD reports
- Final terms
- PRIPS, KIIDs, etc.

Portfolio management

- Performance measurement
- Attribution
- Risk reporting
- Investment reporting
- Data aggregation and validation

Experience with third-party platforms

- FIS VPM
- FactSet
- MSCI Barra
- SunGard FIS
- SEI ARCHWAY
- FIS INVESTRAN
- TLM
- Aladdin (by BlackRock)
- GENEVA
- PORT
- ALLVUE
- Bloomberg
- WSO
- Global Portfolio