As their global operating models evolve, what do investment managers need from their service providers and what can they do to help themselves?

Philippe Chambadal, CEO of middle- and back-office processing technology provider SmartStream, discusses the post-trade landscape and the regulatory and operational challenges facing market participants.

Much work has been done to standardise and automate fund processing, with several commercial solutions available, but the cost of processing fund transactions is still significantly higher than for bonds or equities and this is hampering critical mass. Is a more centralised market infrastructure needed to tackle processing costs? Writer Frances Maguire

An unprecedented overhaul of the securities industry is taking place under politically mandated reform. This is forcing markets and regulators to work more closely together to ensure that there is no repeat of the recent financial crisis. Writer Frances Maguire

Banks' back offices were exposed by the recent crisis as inefficient, lacking in scalability and ripe for increased regulatory scrutiny. Policy-makers and regulators, meanwhile, began to call for the creation of centralised industry utilities, in a bid to reduce the systemic risk associated with the trading, processing and clearing of a variety of complex products.

Both governments and global regulators are pushing banks and money managers to streamline their post-trade processing operations, improve transparency and to take a real-time approach in the back-office environment.