Northern Trust says its outsourcing service for global fund managers is gathering momentum. The so-called Trade Services service aims to let fund managers outsource some aspects of post-execution processing of equities, bonds, and foreign exchange to Northern Trust, while retaining other functions, such as maintaining books and records and client reporting information, in-house.
“Over the last 18 months, we have gone live with this service for several global fund managers, and the response has been very positive,” says Penelope Biggs, Head of Business Development and Global Fund Services for Northern Trust. “By using our Trade Services module, these investment managers gain all the advantages of straight-through processing, without incurring the associated capital, technology, and operational costs. We are aggressively rolling the service out to our existing investment manager clients and already this new capability has resulted in us being awarded several new service mandates.”
Northern Trust is offering broker-dealer matching, foreign exchange matching, third party communications, exception resolution, and counter party performance evaluation. It says these services relieve fund manages of the costs of adapting to industry and technological changes; capitalize on economies of scale by funneling traffic into Northern Trust securities processing systems; transform fixed costs into variable costs, which are based on usage; and eliminate manual processes through automated trade processing.