About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

Fund Managers Fall Short on Reviewing Broker Performance

Subscribe to our newsletter

Fund managers are falling short on calculating the implicit costs of trading, and on a broader scale are unaware as to exactly how much money is being spent with brokers due to a failure to fully review all their relationships qualitatively and quantitatively.

According to research from OpenGamma, a provider of derivatives analytics, despite the majority of fund managers having formal broker review processes in place, only 11% assess how all their brokers are actually performing. Prime-brokers, under the spotlight recently about whether or not they are charging a fair price to finance fund managers making speculative bets, are the group reviewed most frequently.

The study was carried out over a two-month period across 22 investment management firms. In terms of whether or not fund managers are calculating the implicit costs of trading, findings show that implicit costs, the costs of bid-offer spreads, were only calculated by half of firms, although analysing implicit trading costs has become key to understanding the real value of broker relationships.

For fund managers, the challenges include collecting and calculating data, which is becoming ‘very time consuming’, leading the majority (75%) of respondents planning to enhance their operational processes over the next year.

Commenting on the results, Maxime Jeanniard du Dot, chief operating officer at OpenGamma, says: “Having a process for assessing how brokers are performing is without question very valuable, but only when carried out. While regulations will be a big driver in reviewing broker performance, fund managers also have a strict fiduciary responsibility to investors. On top of this, as the geopolitical landscape begins to take shape over the coming months, it is clear that fund managers will need to gain a new level of insight to understand the best brokers to do business with.”

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Upcoming Webinar: Best Practices for Managing Trade Surveillance

1 July 2025 10:00am ET | 3:00pm London | 4:00pm CET Duration: 50 Minutes The surge in trading volumes combined with the emergence of new digital financial assets and geopolitical events have added layers of complexity to market activities. Traditional surveillance methods often struggle to keep pace with these changes, leading to difficulties in detecting...

BLOG

A-Team Group Announces Winners of its TradingTech Insight Awards Europe 2025

A-Team Group has revealed the winners of the TradingTech Insight Awards Europe 2025. These prestigious awards celebrate excellence in trading solutions and services, highlighting vendors who provide outstanding trading infrastructure, technology, and data solutions to capital markets participants across Europe. This year, the awards featured over 40 categories of trading technology solutions and services. These...

EVENT

TradingTech Briefing New York

Our TradingTech Briefing in New York is aimed at senior-level decision makers in trading technology, electronic execution, trading architecture and offers a day packed with insight from practitioners and from innovative suppliers happy to share their experiences in dealing with the enterprise challenges facing our marketplace.

GUIDE

AI in Capital Markets: Practical Insight for a Transforming Industry – Free Handbook

AI is no longer on the horizon – it’s embedded in the infrastructure of modern capital markets. But separating real impact from inflated promises requires a grounded, practical understanding. The AI in Capital Markets Handbook 2025 provides exactly that. Designed for data-driven professionals across the trade life-cycle, compliance, infrastructure, and strategy, this handbook goes beyond...