We serve Financial Services clients exclusively. Our consultants are seasoned professionals who have worked with and for major buy-side and sell-side firms leveraging technology and service providers to achieve real economic value for our clients.

Client Challenge

Due to increased trading volumes from proprietary and client business, this global capital markets player had seen a very large increase in operational fails. The breakdown in controls, and a large outstanding number of settlement failures, had been acknowledged by business management, internal audit and regulators, who had requested action as a matter of urgency.

Cambrian Approach

We worked with the operations and technology groups from three regions (Americas, Europe and Asia Pacific) to create middle-office control policies and processes with appropriate metrics to monitor operational fails across its 28 countries and multiple product lines. We analyzed a number of cause-effect scenarios, including systems stability, data quality, training, product complexity and trading volumes to identify where the breakdowns were occurring in each region. We also identified short-term improvements to reduce the level of fails to a reasonable level within three months, and longer-term solutions which would be able to constrain the level of fails if volumes continued to increase.

Business Results

The proposed solution was presented to senior management from business, technology and operations groups before phased roll-out to the three main regions: Americas, Europe and Asia Pacific. The fail levels decreased and met levels acceptable to the auditors, management and regulators.