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

Post-Trade for ETDs: The Final Frontier for Buy-Side Operational Efficiency?

Subscribe to our newsletter

The fund management industry’s shift to passive funds and embrace of smart-beta funds over the past decade or so has shaved margins to the extreme. In this environment, operational efficiency becomes an existential issue.

Across a broad swathe of asset classes, front-office technologies have kept pace with massive changes in market structure driven by regulation and innovation. But post-trade business processes continue to play catch-up.

Nowhere is this more true than in exchange-traded derivatives, where few technology options are available to aid buy-side firms as they face a myriad of challenges as they strive to ensure efficiency, accuracy and regulatory compliance.

The use of multiple clearing brokers is fragmenting buy-side operational processes. The continued T+1 availability of clearing data is introducing delays in delivering final trade and position confirmations to clients. The reliance by brokers on files for data delivery is blocking development of a more efficient messaging standard.

And there’s more.

The buy-side’s reliance on manually processed broker-provided clearing data makes fund managers’ work flows prone to errors. Commission management is typically handled outside of the post-trade process, requiring fund managers to re-integrate this information after the event for fund administration and client reporting. And the increasing complexity of the execution landscape – with funds trending towards more block trades – is making it difficult to calculate a true price.

All of these issues are conspiring to disrupt work flows and introduce operational risk and costs into the post-trade process.

Market practitioners, however, are working to address inefficiencies in post trade. For a discussion of the challenges currently facing players in the ETD space and industry initiatives designed to address them, please download this free paper by clicking here.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Upcoming Webinar: Unlocking value: Harnessing modern data platforms for data integration, advanced investment analytics, visualisation and reporting

4 September 2025 10:00am ET | 3:00pm London | 4:00pm CET Duration: 50 Minutes Modern data platforms are bringing efficiencies, scalability and powerful new capabilities to institutions and their data pipelines. They are enabling the use of new automation and analytical technologies that are also helping firms to derive more value from their data and...

BLOG

Is the End in Sight? Plotting the Journey to Consolidated Tape in the EU and UK Markets

By Anne Plested, MCSI, Senior Product Manager for Regulation, ION Markets. The realization of consolidated tape has been long-awaited for equities trading in the UK and the European Union (EU). With the European Commission (EC) adopting the enabling technical standards on 12 June and the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) launching its search for...

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...