Stay ahead with streamlined post-trade processing
Singer Capital Markets taps FIS Post Trade Processing Platform (formerly Torstone) to unlock control over real-time dataAt a glance
Featured product
FIS Post Trade Processing Platform
Objectives
- Real-time personalized data for fast decision-making
- Advanced reporting to quickly react to market conditions
- Greater flexibility and control to drive operational efficiency
- Improved risk and inventory management
- Control over back-office costs to stay competitive
Results
The platform enables Singer Capital Markets to streamline processes and supercharge its post-trade operations, allowing it to quickly react to market conditions and provide better service to clients – making their money work harder.
Impact
Singer Capital Markets found the Post Trade Processing Platform:
- Drove efficiencies through a “single integrated” cross-asset platform
- Gave the firm greater control to empower business decision-making
- Kept business costs low with no additional headcount
- Freed staff to focus on growing the business
Client profile
Singer Capital Markets is a leading stockbroker dedicated to serving the small- and mid-cap sectors in the U.K. As one of the leading independent institutional stockbrokers and corporate advisers, with approximately 100 corporate clients, Singer Capital Markets provides expert advice and capital-raising services to growth companies and investment funds.
Over time, Singer Capital Markets had accumulated multiple systems and reporting structures to manage its post-trade processes, creating inefficiencies by requiring manual processes to connect various platforms.
With the FIS® Post Trade Processing Platform (formerly Torstone), the firm was able to streamline processes and supercharge its post-trade operations, allowing it to quickly react to market conditions and provide better service to clients – making their money work harder.
Rather than being tied up on basic daily tasks, the Post Trade Processing Platform gave Singer Capital Markets’ operations and finance teams the real-time data, advanced reporting, flexibility and scalability to better service its clients and more effectively monitor risk across the business to drive growth.
The challenge
Before working with FIS, Singer Capital Markets operated under a Model-A clearing agreement with a leading securities services company. It used a legacy system from the outsourced provider to review back-office trades, settlement statuses, cash and stock balances, and individual stock and cash transactions relating to trade activity.
The challenge with this system was twofold: data wasn’t available in real time, and Singer Capital Markets relied heavily on staff at the outsourced provider to deliver the data and reports it needed. This led to a host of issues:
- Real-time stock and cash ladders, as well as exposure reporting, were not readily accessible.
- Satisfying a basic query from the company’s C-Suite/senior leadership team that was not possible in real time; it required a call to the outsourced provider, possibly taking many days before a report would be delivered. As a result, not able to respond dynamically to changing market conditions.
- Inventory management was complex and time-consuming, requiring yet another call to the outsourced provider to arrange for CREST instruction splitting, then waiting for them to process the instruction. This operational inefficiency disrupted workflows, caused unnecessary delays and created logistical gaps that negatively impacted the client.
Singer Capital Markets wanted to mitigate the risk of relying on an outsourced provider and have access to real-time data, ad hoc reporting and simple inventory management. Along with control over its data and business, the solution had to be cost-effective to help Singer Capital Markets stay competitive and grow its business.
The solution
The most important goals for Singer Capital Markets were:
- Real-time personalized data for fast decision-making
- Advanced reporting to quickly react to market conditions
- Greater flexibility and control to drive operational efficiency
- Improved risk and inventory management
- Control over back-office costs to stay competitive
The Post Trade Processing Platform provided all these features and more, supercharging Singer Capital Markets’ post-trade operations with unmatched efficiency and enabling their money to work harder.
The solution captures and enriches transactions from multiple front-office systems and locations, ensuring all transactions, regardless of asset class, are consolidated onto a single platform at the earliest opportunity within the processing lifecycle.
Trial balances are calculated in real time, with the ability to look backward to a specific point in time, as well as forward to project cash funding requirements.
That ability is fundamental because, historically, firms have used end-of-day reports to justify discrepancies. Stock balances, stock ladders and fails also update in real time. With the Post Trade Processing Platform, users can fix a problem (settle a trade or input a journal into the correct accounting period) and rerun a report immediately.
Stock priority can also be managed within the platform – for example, to ensure LCH trades settle on a priority basis to avoid fines and buy-ins, and that all trades can be easily split within the platform and fed automatically to CREST in real time.Furthermore, being able to produce granular reporting for export to many formats right from the Post Trade Processing Platform allows users to quickly react to market conditions and better serve clients.
The platform’s modular, cloud-based architecture and regular monthly upgrades ensure the system remains secure, modern and future-proof. Agile software-as-a-service deployment means the next-generation technology is easy to implement while slashing the total cost of ownership. The platform can quickly adapt to new regulations and changing business models, and scale to fit organizations of any size or complexity.
The results
Singer Capital Markets found the Post Trade Processing Platform:
- Drove efficiencies through a “single integrated” cross-asset platform
- Gave the firm greater control to empower business decision-making
- Kept business costs low with no additional headcount
- Freed staff to focus on growing the business
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