When the Investment Operations team from American Century Investments (ACI) was tasked with optimizing their operational workflows from an efficiency and risk standpoint it became clear that fully leveraging DTCC’s Institutional Trade Processing (ITP) solution could help.
ACI’s Attar Singh Sokhal and Cihan Kasikara explained their journey with DTCC’s Matt Johnson, focusing on the steps they are taking to increase straight through processing (STP) and reduce time to settlement by creating an end-to-end integrated workflow for their post-trade processes.
Related: Get to Know ITP Data Analytics
Transition from Local to Central Matching
As a first step, ACI made the recommendation to fully integrate DTCC’s CTM™ platform, enabling them to centrally match cross-border and domestic transactions and automate the trade confirmation process across multiple asset classes.
"We migrated all of our international equity flow onto CTM, with an STP rate of around 99%. The transition has been very positive. Our operations team has benefited from CTM being fully integrated with our internal order management system (OMS) system, which links back to our core vision of an end-to-end, integrated workflow.” – Attar Singh Sokhal, American Century Investments
Leverage ITP Solutions to Automatically Enrich Trades
ACI’s focus then turned to amplifying the benefits of using multiple ITP solutions by ensuring that trades in CTM are enriched with the most up-to-date SSIs. ACI is a long-time user of ALERT®, the industry’s largest and most compliant SSI database, and recently implemented ALERT Key Auto Select (AKAS) which automatically enriches all their trades matched through CTM with accurate SSIs.
In addition, ACI leverages ALERT Global Custodian Direct (GCD) – a workflow supporting a custodian managed SSI model, further ensuring that information is accurate and up to date. In fact, 80% of American Century Investment’s accounts are managed through GCD and they are working to move their remaining custodians to this workflow.
“As we look at SSI enrichment and STP, our focus has been on exception-based processing, which brings us high level of efficiencies and productivity in our global operating model.” – Cihan Kasikara, American Century Investments
Assess and Implement Further ITP Capabilities
With CSDR challenges and new changes on the horizon for T+1 in mind, ACI continues to evaluate more ways to improve their operational processes and settlement rates. By integrating with additional ITP services and functionality, such as CTM’s Match to Instruct (M2i) workflow, DTCC Exception Manager and ITP Data Analytics, ACI can provide their clients with an elevated experience.
“We continue to assess further capabilities like CTM’s Match to Instruct (M2i) workflow and DTCC Exception Manager. These services all play a crucial part in the CSDR environment, and we feel that they should be integrated with the firm's infrastructure. We are also a data-driven organization, so metrics and statistics are extremely important to us. The recent developments with ITP Data Analytics will play a key role in that transparency. Our goal is to provide our clients with a heightened operational experience that adds value.” – Attar Singh Sokhal, American Century Investments
Hear the entire conversation: