Investment Compliance Services
Acuity Knowledge Partners’ (Acuity’s) Investment compliance support across pre- and post-trade monitoring, guideline interpretation and coding and trade surveillance has enabled compliance functions to do more with less . We help our clients protect themselves against reputational and financial risk as a result of guideline breaches, incorrect trades, market abuse and insider trading.
Our team of experts has a unique combination of skill sets. They have extensive experience in order management/compliance systems such as Bloomberg AIM, Ion’s Latent Zero Sentinel, Charles River Database (CRIMS), LDC, ThinkFolio and BlackRock’s Aladdin, BTCA and SMARTS. They also bring deep domain understanding such as the Investment compliance monitoring functions and knowledge of global regulations such as the Investment Company Act of 1940, UCITS, Inv-G, ERISA, FINRA, the Securities Act of 1933, SFC, MpFA, FSA and APRA.
Who we serve
Trade Surveillance and Investment Compliance Services Support we offer
- Onboarding new funds, client accounts (institutional, private clients & general accounts)
- Interpretation and analysis of guidelines (IMA, prospectus, SAI etc.)
- Creation and/or adding rules per guidelines on investment compliance platform
- Account hierarchy mapping, documentation and process hygiene flows
- Quality Check and simulation testing for validation of rules and their output
- Guideline mandate revisions/amendments
- Testing and auditing of amended rules as well as not amended existing rules
- List creation, updates and maintenance
- Rule optimizations and/ or updating rules per system enhancements
- Rule coding standardization through universal rules and rule libraries
- Scrubbing existing accounts to incorporate new logics and enhancements
- Account termination or closure process.
- Pre-trade monitoring of to be executed trades to ensure adherence of guidelines
- Post-trade monitoring to ensure no violation of guidelines due to executed trades or other factors such is inadequate data, market movements, etc.
- Monitoring notifications to portfolio managers or client account managers to take corrective action for any violation occurred
- Root cause analysis of investment guideline violations alerts
- Standardizing the process through best practices and standard templates
- Responding on ad-hoc queries & requests from the portfolio management team
- Trends and volume analysis reports
- Data science tools for analysis and resolutions of major contributing alerts
- Responding to custodian emails in case if there is any difference in coding or monitoring methodology.
- Market abuse monitoring
- Market manipulation monitoring
- Short Sales “block” reviews
- Take-over panel disclosures
- Significant shareholding disclosures
- Trade allocation & best execution reviews
- Layering, spoofing
- Front running
- Insider trading activity
- Ramping
- Marking the open & Close price
- Wash and cross trade monitoring
- Rapid increase in order activities
- Internal surveillance controls (as of trade, extended settlements, etc.)
- Late trade monitoring
- Rule 793 disclosures
- Post trade reallocation monitoring
- Trade order priority monitoring
How we are different
We implement industry best practices for pre- and post-trade monitoring, rule testing and documentation to create an efficient and robust process framework.
We are experienced in compliance tools such as Sentinel, Charles River, Bloomberg AIM, and BlackRock‘s Aladdin.
We have the expertise to compile investment policies based on categories and asset classifications, which could be further leveraged to build innovative automation solutions for investment compliance services and assist in investment decision making.
We provide simulation and real-time validations for compliance in pre-trade and post-trade activity and while executing what-if scenarios to ensure all risks are covered and every anomaly is captured.
We conduct deep-dive analyses to help design efficient investment compliance services operating models for gap analysis (on regulatory changes) and incorporate the changes to make the solution more efficient and effective in any compliance environment.