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Bridgewater Associates, one of the largest hedge funds in the world with $120 billion in assets, will soon use Northern Trust to shadow the fund administration work it outsourced to BNY Mellon in 2011. For asset managers, outsourcing middle and back office work to custodians is nothing new; it has been going on for years as the big custodians like JPMorgan, Citi, BNY Mellon, Brown Brothers Harriman and Northern Trust use their skills, plus massive deployments of technology, in the high-volume, low-margin business of fund administration. The first big fund…

By Mark Richards (mark.richards01@sap.com) and Steve Shaffer (steve.shaffer@sap.com) In our first blog post we split our response to the changing Finance landscape into three areas: Culture, Team and Technology. We also discussed how cloud technology can be a great enabler to expand the contribution of Finance within your company. Our second blog post, went into areas that improved your teams’ connection to and relevance to the business. For this post, we touch on the engine that drives our response to the changing landscape: The culture of the Finance team. It’s…

With at least three out of ten companies now transferring money under the SEPA initiative, the issue of direct debits is fast approaching – the processing of which will have to be standardized across Europe as of February 1, 2014, and which up until now barely anyone uses. According to the results of a SEPA focus group held by the German Speaking SAP User Group (DSAG), the issue of mandate management poses particular problems. Photo: iStockphoto Luckily, when Hoya, a Japanese technology company, created its in-house bank in 2006, it also made…

Despite the persistent economic malaise, this year turned out to be memorable and one that made it proud to be British. Queen Elizabeth II celebrated 60 years on the throne; Team GB won bucket loads of medals at the Olympics and ParaOlympics; Andy Murray became the first Briton to win a tennis grand slam for 76 years and Bradley Wiggins put in a faultless if somewhat unexciting ride to become the first British rider to win the Tour de France. So like 1966, when England won the World Cup, 2012 could turn out to be one of our finest, talked about for…

Fund managers can use data they already have to monitor each step of their investment supply chain — from broker research to in-house analysts, trade execution and portfolio management with a new tool from Advent Software. Data which already exists inside firms has great potential to improve returns, said Todd Gottula, chief technology officer at Advent Software, whose investment software tools are used at more than 4,500 firms.  The company is rolling out Advent Direct, a new cloud-based system that lets investment managers take data from their Advent modules and other enterprise systems such as SalesForce.com, to generate a view…

Welcome to 2013, Year 5 of what many economists, including those who compiled Ernst & Young’s latest economic forecast for the Eurozone , are calling the ‘lost decade’ marked by low or no existent growth and high unemployment. With government spending squeezed, everyone expects the private sector to provide the stimulus that will get us back to growth but companies are keeping the lid firmly on their excess cash, which the McKinsey Global Institute say has reached the highest levels for over two decades. So…

This is a post from a series that SAP commissioned from Steve Player, who runs his own practice, The Player Group and also heads up the Beyond Budgeting Roundtable in North America,  reflecting on how innovations such as mobile, cloud and in-memory computing are helping to transform planning and performance management. The late Stephen R. Covey often told the story of a woodcutter working feverishly sawing logs. But no matter how hard he worked, progress was slow. When an observer asked about the progress, the woodcutter readily explained the work was…

Trading stood still on more than 200 companies Monday, as a server kept the New York Stock Exchange from publishing quotes for most of the day. Taken alone, this seems like a technical glitch. But combined with earlier problems, such as Knight Capital in August, Facebook in May, BATS in March and other issues this year, the glitch begins to look like a SNAFU. And U.S. regulators taking note. Second Winded The reelection of U.S. President

Whether in response to the 2008 financial crisis or this year’s LIBOR scandal, governments across the globe are tightening regulations for the financial industry in order to reduce market volatility and risk. With the right technology, investment banks can do their part to minimize risk, in real time, even for mobile users. To that end, the consultants at Deloitte Development LLC have created a Reference Architecture for Risk. This IT architecture defines the kinds of systems Deloitte believes are ideally suited to protect financial organizations from making trades…

The American plan to develop a centralized Legal Entity Identifier and run it through the DTCC in New York ran into heated opposition at a meeting of the Financial Stability Board (FSB) in Basel in mid-October. In the U.S., Dodd-Frank requires the the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC)  to mandate the use of an LEI has moved ahead with its own version of the LEI — the non-intelligent 18-digit random number plus two check digits –  promoted by the DTCC, SWIFT and SIFMA — which it requires for parties to U.S….

NYSE Technologies has several investment firms participating in a new pilot — instead of downloading all the end of day trade and quote data they are taking the result of NYSE Technologies’ analytics. Actually, said Jennifer Nayar, head of global data products at the firm, most are taking both so they can test the value of the analysis NYSE Technologies performs. “We have been in the business of offering end of day trade and quote data for the last 8 years or so, working with 1010data. That involves multiple customers coming…

Survey by digital agency Rosetta reveals that consumers prefer online banking to traditional branch banking More consumers now log-on to do their banking than pop into their local branch. While over half (52%) say the Internet is the main way they do their banking just under a third (32%) prefer to visit a bank’s branch office. Online banking is most frequently used to carry out basic tasks such as checking account balances, making individual bill payments to another account, transferring funds between accounts and seeking financial information. However, nearly half (48%) are keen to do all their banking online, found Rosetta’s survey of 1,100 individuals…

Experts at The Economist discuss why fusty old retail banking faces its biggest shake-up in 200 years: “Finance has seen plenty of dramas over the years. But one thing has remained constant for a century at least: the branch banking system. Across most of Europe a handful of large banks, each with thousands of branches, stand astride their national markets. In America Depression-era legislation constrained the growth of big national banks, but at the state level the bricks-and-mortar architecture is pretty similar. While the rest of the sector innovated, expanded and collapsed, retail banking has been staid…