This week, RegTech Insight was delighted to welcome Mark Solomon, Director of Trading & Securities Operations at Brandywine Global Investment Management, who sat down with our very own Chief of Content Andrew Delaney to discuss approaches to regulatory trade reporting and, in particular, the challenges of reporting across multiple jurisdictions for multiple regulations.
Brandywine, a fixed income and equities manager based in Philadelphia with around $65 billon assets under management and an affiliate of the global Franklin Templeton Group, has a large client base outside the US – especially in Europe, Australia, and Singapore – and the EMIR and ASIC reporting regimes are crucial for its compliance, while it also has tangential requirements under MiFID II and SFTR.
Although the official reporting responsibility under both regimes actually lies with the end user, the client, more often than not they don’t have the expertise, the technology, or the capacity to do so – therefore they rely on an administrator or, more usually, their investment manager to handle it for them. So what are the options?
There are numerous solutions. Some develop in-house, while many investment managers choose to delegate reporting to a broker dealer. Brandywine, however, chose to go down the partnership route, selecting integrated reporting from IHS Markit. “It was important for us that we had this capability for our clients, and that it was a best-in-class solution,” explains Solomon. “In this day and age, when data privacy and security is of the utmost importance, our attorneys weren’t comfortable with handing that responsibility over to a dealer – but nor did we want to hire full-time staff to support the process. That might work for larger firms, but for small and medium-sized asset managers, we feel it’s better to leverage a partner such as IHS Markit: which has good technology, lots of experience – and most importantly, is really connected with the regulators and understands the nuances of these changing requirements.”
The data challenges for these reporting requirements are substantial. Solomon cites hurdles such as acquiring and translating data across all different asset classes, reporting to a third party trade repository within very tight deadlines, ensuring accuracy, and resolving errors in a timely manner.
To hear more about the data challenges of cross-jurisdictional regulatory reporting, and to follow Brandywine’s journey in selecting a partner, executing the project and ensuring quality. You’ll learn about the benefits of the partnership model, the reason that Brandywine chose IHS Markit, the history behind the partnership, the complexity of execution, and the many benefits that the journey brought to both players.
To finish up: what is Solomon’s advice to firms looking to implement their own regulatory reporting solutions?
“It’s really important for people to do their own research into what these requirements are,” he stresses. “You need to be an active participant in projects like this in order to get the optimal solution for your clients. There’s a lot to this, and it’s important that the people who need to address these challenges know what they are getting into, and are willing to get their hands dirty and dig in to understand the full process.”
To learn more about this topic, why not check out our latest Webinar: Best Practices for Integrated Regulatory Reporting Across Multiple Jurisdictions, available for download now.
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