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

New legislation for over-the-counter derivatives from the European Commission next year will include a central counterparty directive. But what are the implications of the new law? Writer Frances Maguire

Post-trade processing is an expensive overhead for financial firms, while the potential operational risk associated with trade breaks and bottlenecks is attracting increasing regulatory scrutiny. 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.

In the wake of the collapse of two major banks - Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns - global custodian banks are persuading increasingly wary hedge fund managers to consider placing some of their assets into their relatively safe hands, rather than risk placing everything with prime brokers. Writer Frances Maguire

Growing competition in the post-trade clearing and settlement infrastructure, brought about by MiFID, could dramatically reshape Europe's custody market. Writer Frances Maguire

In recent months, the securities lending market has suffered from a febrile equities environment and ongoing restrictions on short-sell positions. Can the introduction of central counterparty services restore the sector’s fortunes? Writer Frances Maguire.