Broker-dealers face significant operational challenges when dealing with some of the alternative investment products, which are increasingly popular right now with investors and their reps. These subaccounting challenges include the unique trading windows, redemption processes, and reporting requirements of these alternative investment vehicles.
Current operational hurdles
B-Ds struggle with several key issues:
- Trading window management: Many B-Ds lack automated systems to handle the periodic trading windows of interval funds
- Trade warehousing: There's often no capability to hold trades during closed periods
- Redemption allocation: Allocating partial redemptions during repurchase windows is often a manual, error-prone process
- Dividend calculations: Trade reversals can necessitate recalculating dividends, a time-consuming task
These challenges have led some B-Ds to gatekeep or reject these products or resort to non-scalable, spreadsheet-based solutions.
Our experience helping B-Ds streamline operations
We’ve worked with multiple broker-dealers facing the problems noted above. They’ve wanted to do away with workarounds—and thereby enable scale and reduce operational risk.
In our experience, what works well is a subaccounting system with capabilities for alternatives that are as automated as they are for more traditional products that can:
Automatically manage trading windows and warehouse trades. This eliminates the need to manually turn funds on and off to mimic trading windows.
Automated approach for prorated trades. This can reduce processing time from days to moments. This is particularly beneficial for large-scale tender offers. With these processes automated, B-Ds can eliminate side or manual processes for tracking trades outside of the standard subaccounting flow—and the associated corrections, dividend recalculations, etc.
Processing consistently with established flows for ’40 Act products positions a broker-dealer to participate in this exciting growth area without increased risk or operational burden.