Birla Sun Life Asset Management Company Ltd, an Indian mutual fund manager, is the first domestic fund manager in India to go live on Omgeo Central Trade Manager (Omgeo CTM) and Omgeo ALERT for cross-border post-trade processing and standing settlement and account instruction (SSI) enrichment.
Omgeo CTM enables the Birla Sun Life Mutual Fund to automatically match the details of its cross-border transactions, minimizing the inefficiency and operational risk associated with manual trade processing. The company also gains access to Omgeos global community of 6,000 broker/dealers and investment managers.
The fund has also implemented Omgeo ALERT, the Web-based global database for the maintenance and communication of standing settlement and account instructions (SSIs). With ALERT, the fund can automatically enrich its Omgeo CTM trade details with ALERT data, and will have the ability to send settlement messages in SWIFT industry-standard formats to custodians and interested third parties from a single source.
ALERT has long been the industry-standard database for SSIs, but has faced some competition since 2009 when a rival, OpenSettlement, was launched. For a profile of the two systems, see OpenSettlement takes on ALERT, Global Custodian, Winter 2010.
Implementing Omgeo CTM and Omgeo ALERT has enabled us to improve the efficiency of our settlement process, says A. Balasubramanian, CEO of Birla Sun Life Asset Management Company. COO Ashok Suvarna says: We expect this will result in more trades settling on time and a significantly reduced number of instances where client and counterparty instructions are mismatched.
James E. Drumm, executive director, Asia Pacific, at Omgeo, adds: We are very pleased that Birla Sun Life Asset Management Company has chosen to join our global community. Birla Sun Lifes adoption of Omgeo CTM will enable the company to achieve increased scalability and accelerate their settlement cycle as their international investments grow, while clearly demonstrating a commitment to robust operational risk management practices.
According to Omgeo, India has the highest settlement efficiency scores in the world for its domestic trades.
Omgeo is competing head to head with SWIFT on an automated trade-matching platform. See The narcissism of small differences, Global Custodian, Spring 2011.