Fixed Income Managers Automate Pool Delivery with Charles River IMS’ Advanced Mortgage / TBA Capabilities
- Unique Mortgage TBA Functionality Streamlines Order Flow; Only Major Buy Side OMS Designated as EPN Vendor -
BURLINGTON, MA, LONDON, MELBOURNE and SINGAPORE, October 17, 2005 — Charles River Development today announced that fixed income managers can reliably automate and streamline the delivery of mortgage-backed securities (MBS) pools through the Charles River Investment Management System’s (Charles River IMS) distinctive and integrated TBA (To Be Announced) MBS functionality. Charles River IMS’ unique TBA functionality allows investment managers to buy, sell, and monitor TBA positions and transactions in real-time from within the same application that they use to manage global equity, fixed income, foreign exchange, compliance, and settlements activities. The system helps managers optimize their MBS positions and automates the TBA delivery and settlement process. In addition, the firm completed its conformance testing in 2004 and is listed as an EPN (Electronic Pool Notification) Software Solution Vendor by the Fixed Income Clearing Corporation. Charles River IMS is currently the only major buy side order management system (OMS) listed.
“Prior to adopting our TBA functionality, many of our fixed income clients used multiple applications and manual processes for the management of their TBA positions and transactions. Tasks such as determining portfolio exposure, ensuring compliance, creating turns and pair-offs, and managing pool receipt and delivery are significantly easier with our integrated approach to TBA processing. Charles River IMS also interfaces with FICC’s EPN application (both CTCI and EaSyPool) which is an absolute requirement for any significant transaction volume,” said Rick Enfield, director of fixed income product management at Charles River. “The nature of TBA processing, especially the TBA-to-specified-pool-replacement process, is extremely labor intensive and time consuming – with very tight deadlines. As a result of our customer-focused, market-driven approach to product development, we’ve been able to significantly streamline and simplify mortgage-backed securities operations. In addition, we’ve gone beyond basic functionality to provide capabilities for optimizing the pool receipt and delivery process, and to conduct partial pairing and turning.”
According to the FICC Web site, EPN reduces risk and streamlines operations by eliminating error-prone manual processing. Before the EPN system was in place, MBS workflows required recipients to be available for the successful delivery of pool information via fax or telephone. Manual processing errors, communications problems, and the inaccessibility of recipients often resulted in billions of dollars in failed MBS.
Charles River IMS TBA Functionality
Charles River IMS is a comprehensive software suite for multi-currency, global, 24x7 portfolio management and modeling, order management and electronic trading, real-time compliance monitoring, and centralized post-trade communications for all security types. For the management of TBA activities, Charles River Manager and Charles River Trader, the portfolio management and order management components of Charles River IMS, allow investment managers to create initial TBA Buy or Sell orders and enforce stipulations. Managers can create all associated transactions supporting the TBA activities – rolls, turns, and deliveries – on a full or partial basis. For TBA Buy transactions, clients can manage the associated messages and files pertaining to pool delivery. For TBA Sell transactions, clients can optimize pools to be delivered, taking into account the selection of pools held in their portfolios, open TBA Buy transactions and inbound pools pending delivery. Charles River Manager also includes an embedded TBA Calculator that automatically creates the security and order based on existing inventory while conforming to Good Delivery rules, and ensures pre-trade, post-execution and portfolio-level compliance. Charles River IMS also includes the TBMA (The Bond Market Association) standard product codes and settlement dates. The system updates open TBA positions automatically in real-time as transactions occur, including full and partial pool assignments, pair-offs, turns, and forward rolls. The result is a streamlined order flow fully integrated with all aspects of the portfolio management, compliance, trading, and settlement processes across all asset classes.
Charles River IMS offers several methods for assigning inventory to a TBA including the FICC’s EPN and ESP, File Export, and manual entry. Generation of the appropriate closing, pair-off, and forward roll transactions occur as necessary when the TBA commitment has been satisfied. Additionally, Charles River provides an easy method for pool substitutions and factor changes on the unsettled pool orders.
About Charles River Development
Charles River Development is a market-leading provider of software and services to 175 investment managers in the global mutual fund, banking, pension, hedge fund, wealth management, and insurance industries. The Charles River Investment Management System is a comprehensive front-to-middle-office software suite for all security types that includes Charles River Manager for portfolio management and modeling; Charles River Trader for order management and electronic trading; Charles River Compliance for real-time pre-trade and end-of-day compliance; and Charles River Settlements for centralized post-trade processing. The system incorporates real-time FIX trading via the Charles River Network, a reliable, secure, private financial network.
Charles River IMS features a modern, proven, N-Tier service oriented architecture (SOA) that is highly scalable and supports continuous 24x7 operations. Charles River combined state-of-the-art (Java, Microsoft .NET and Web services) and industry- standard technologies to ensure Charles River IMS is open, flexible, scalable, functionally rich, and easy-to-use. Message-based APIs and exposed Web services facilitate rapid systems integration.
The company offers many services to complement its software including implementation services and managed services (hosted and remote application management). Founded in 1984, Charles River maintains headquarters in Boston and primary offices in London, Melbourne, Paris, and Singapore.
|
|
