Custody and securities: a target operating model for institutional services
FINANCIAL SERVICES · OPERATING MODEL · TECHNOLOGY
The situation
A global securities services provider needed to re-engineer its custody and asset-administration model. Regional data silos, non-standard client intake, and fragmented downstream reporting were straining daily unit-pricing windows, reconciliations, and compliance, and a large client migration ahead threatened to multiply back-office cost if the model was not overhauled first. Intake ran on unstructured faxes, emails, and custom templates that blocked automated validation, and security setup, matching, and margin calculations were duplicated across client-centric teams.
The work
We designed an enterprise target operating model across eight service lines.
Built a single data-capture layer with document recognition and exception reporting to validate instructions at the point of capture, before they reached the ledgers.
Reorganised teams from client groupings into process lines, registry, trade management, market information, settlement and asset control, and unit pricing, and hardened domestic and international cut-off timetables to protect daily valuations.
Made the central investment-accounting platform the single source of truth, with automated flows through to the general ledger, removing parallel position databases.
Built a $39 million business case, ranked across sixteen workstreams by net present value, prioritising unit pricing and fund accounting.
The outcome
Component-level process definitions and clear owners across all eight service lines.
A modelled path to about 87 roles in run-rate savings, near a third of direct labour, and a fifteen per cent cost-base reduction, with $21 million in net present value.
The client migration de-risked by bringing processing cost toward an automated baseline.