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.