Fund Resource, a division of Quantitative Advisors, says it has developed a tool for mutual fund transfer agents to comply with the proposed rules and regulations of the US Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).
“US mutual fund transfer agents will soon be required to compare each of their shareholder’s registrations and countries of origin against the OFAC Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list,” explains Fund Resource. “This seemingly simple task is complicated by the fact that the OFAC list is constantly being amended and shareholder registrations are constantly changing.”
Fund Resource has created a solution which enables large and small transfer agents to fulfil their compliance and record keeping obligations as well as providing both “exact match” and “very close match” comparison information for transfer agent compliance officers to review and act upon if necessary.
“We have created a solution based upon real world experience,” says Fred Marius, president of Quantitative Advisors, “Our solution eliminates both the manual efforts that currently go into seeking to comply with the proposed regulations and the inexact results of such efforts.” Marius further states that by automating the OFAC SDN list update procedure and with the use of more flexible comparison operators in the searches, Fund Resource’s OFAC Solution provides a comprehensive and useful comparison of the OFAC SDN list against shareholder registration information with little or no user intervention. The solution can either be scheduled for automated comparisons at regular intervals or run manually. The resulting documentation provides an audit trail which includes the dates of each OFAC SDN list update, the dates of each comparison and the result set of close or exact matches to the OFAC SDN list.
Says Marius, “Ultimately, our solution makes compliance with the OFAC rules for mutual fund transfer agents simple and cost effective.”