Omgeo’s Trade Manager Gains Popularity in Japan
August 9, 2010
Omgeo Monday said use was growing in Japan of its central trade manager matching service for fund managers and broker-dealers.
Omgeo, which offers post-trade communication services across the globe, says that its CTM platform is now being used by 18 Japanese broker-dealers and five Japanese investment managers for equity and fixed-income securities.
Omgeo launched the CTM platform, which matches the allocations of fund managers with the confirmations of broker-dealers, in Japan in 2004. Last July, Omgeo linked the CTM to Japanese securities depository Jasdec. Japan is considered the third largest market for Omgeo’s CTM in Asia-Pacific, after Australia and Singapore.
“Omgeo has been committed to the Japanese market for over a decade,” said James Drumm, executive director for Asia-Pacific at Omgeo. “With firms like BlackRock Japan demonstrating leadership in automating fixed-income trade processing, the Omgeo community and the Japanese fixed income market as a whole stand to benefit from reduced risk and increased efficiency.”
Investment manager BlackRock Japan, a subsidiary of BlackRock in New York, said that by linking its global trading platform Aladdin with Omgeo’s CTM it has eliminated the need for paper-based communications between its operations desk and its broker-dealers. Blackrock implemented CTM for Japanese equities in 2006 and for Japanese domestic and global fixed-income securities in 2009.
Jeffrey Plein, managing director for BlackRock Japan’s operations in Tokyo, says that BlackRock’s Aladdin platform will send messages of trade allocations to the CTM while the broker dealer counterparty to BlackRock Japan will send its confirmations.
If the two sides agree in their details a settlement instruction will be generated for either a Japanese trust bank or custodian bank. If they don’t agree, the fund manager or the broker dealer will need to fix its interpretation of the details to send them to the CTM.
"It is very important that the [Japanese] industry migrates to an automated trade confirmation process, across all products,” says Plein. “In doing so, both managers and brokers will be better able to mitigate operating risk, while minimizing expenses.”
