The 5 current challenges in collateral management

This month’s session took place at Eight Moorgate in central London, and across a working breakfast, we enjoyed an open and honest debate on post-trade issue resolution: where we are now, where we should go next, and how the Taskize platform best fits into all of this. 

With a variety of roles and viewpoints in the room, five key themes were discussed and agreed, all of which centred around speeding up and optimising collaboration and resolution in light of increased regulatory focus including – but certainly not limited to – the uncleared margin rules (UMR) regime.

1. In-house-developed comms platforms can back themselves into a corner

The group agreed that, while in-house-developed, client-specific collaboration platforms may have seemed like an initial, nirvana-like ambition some years ago, their lack of interoperability has backed them into a corner. 

To quote one client representing a leading global bank, “Any queries or issues that need to be resolved… If they’re placed into a system like that they just go there to rot!  You need to see it in your own environment, the one that you feel most conformable using on a daily basis.  That’s how you get the quickest resolution.” 

The product-level answer to this question focussed on not only Taskize but also its recent integration with Microsoft Teams as well as sneak previews of further integrations which will launch soon.

2. When a post-trade issue is resolved, it’s finished… But that shouldn’t be the case.

To quote one of our customers who joined us from a large investment bank, “What happens when an issue is resolved?  Right now, they just stand down.  Nothing is said or analysed and we just move on.” 

This is not surprising when you might still have a backlog of a thousand or more issues still to resolve.  As such, we spoke in detail about the automated reporting that is generated the moment a Taskize Bubble is resolved and closed.

3. A collaboration platform optimised for dispute resolution allows you to see the wood from the trees

 It was broadly agreed that using management information capabilities of a collaboration platform like Taskize – that is purpose-built for dispute resolution – allows users to, as one client put it, “spot the themes of disputes and get a helicopter view.  Rather than being stuck in the weeds, or rather than dealing with dispute resolution on a case by case (by case by case by case!) basis, as is the process with traditional email-based comms.”   

In fact, when you combine management information and BI with hundreds of people working across thousands of trades on a daily basis, you can often boil down the main areas of dispute to just a handful of key themes.

4. How can you extract management-level reporting from something so anecdotal as email?

The working group heard how “higher-level management reporting revolves around SLAs such as ‘total under dispute’ and ‘portfolio total age’.”  But, given the unstructured and informal nature of email, such stats can be incredibly hard to extract and become almost anecdotal.  Nonetheless, “This is what the board think about.”

We discussed how this can be automated with Taskize – either for issues raised within our platform, or via its integration with Microsoft Outlook.  Moving forwards, there is clearly an ambition to “get consistency across the industry” on such management-level reporting. 

Going one stage further, how is management information best delivered around the business?

 This part of the conversation asked what we can generate – within the Taskize platform and within our clients’ team structures – “to send out at ‘memo-level’ to our desks and users, to make sure everyone has a view of what, for example, are our top 20 disputes right now?”  In many organisations, if this is happening at all it’s being driven by PowerPoint slides containing a simple list and comments.

The Taskize platform includes both real-time dashboards – providing an up-to-date status of all issues and SLA performance – as well as historical and root cause analysis.  But it’s the internal challenge, of how this is best distributed and consumed within clients, that’s something we’ll circle back on in the future.

5. All members of the Collateral Management Working Group have the opportunity to drive standardisation through a common set of job titles and roles

 “From broker to ‘Principal’ and ‘Order Placer’…  Almost all buy-side and sell-side firms have different names for the same roles.  So, we need to come up with a ‘Naming 101’ on what we call people, and stick to it.”  And, we agreed, who better than those behind a collaboration platform – in use by people with all of these job roles – to come up with it?

Do any of these topics of discussion strike a chord with your or your team?  Find out more at our next Collateral Management Working Group, and contact us for more information on the Taskize platform.