Omgeo, the global standard for post-trade efficiency, today announced that Birla Sun Life Asset Management Company Ltd, one of India's flagship mutual fund managers, 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.
Birla Sun Life is a joint venture between the Aditya Birla Group and Canadian fund manager Sun Life Financial Services Inc. Birla Sun Life Mutual Fund offers a range of investment options and invests in domestic and international markets.
In 2003, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) mandated that market participants replace paper-based institutional equity post-trade details with an electronic straight through processing (STP) service. The mandate enabled market participants to significantly accelerate the domestic trade process in India, promote same day affirmation (SDA) and ensure a smooth transition to a T+2 settlement cycle. As a result, and according to a recent Omgeo discussion paper on SDA, India has achieved the highest settlement efficiency scores in the world. Now, investment managers in India are looking to replicate this level of efficiency for their international cross-border trades. Birla Sun Life Mutual Fund's adoption of Omgeo CTM puts the company at the forefront of this trend.
Omgeo CTM enables Birla Sun Life Mutual Fund to automatically match the details of their cross-border transactions, minimizing the inefficiency and operational risk associated with manual trade processing. The company also gains access to Omgeo's global community of 6000 broker/dealers and investment managers.
Birla Sun Life Mutual Fund has also implemented Omgeo ALERT, the industry's largest web-based global database for the maintenance and communication of standing settlement and account instructions (SSIs). With ALERT, Birla Sun Life Mutual Fund can automatically enrich their Omgeo CTM trade details with ALERT data, ensuring the most current, accurate and compliant SSIs are included. In addition, by opting for the settlement notification feature in Omgeo CTM, Birla Sun Life Mutual Fund now has the ability to send settlement messages in SWIFT industry-standard formats to custodians and interested third parties from one reliable source.
"Implementing Omgeo CTM and Omgeo ALERT has enabled us to improve the efficiency of our settlement process", stated A. Balasubramanian, Chief Executive Officer from Birla Sun Life Asset Management Company.
"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," says Ashok Suvarna, Chief Operations Officer from Birla Sun Life Asset Management Company.
"We are very pleased that Birla Sun Life Asset Management Company has chosen to join our global community," said James E. Drumm, Executive Director Asia Pacific at Omgeo. "Birla Sun Life's 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."