AccessFintech, which delivers collaboration, transparency, shared use cases and control to the financial industry, announces today that it has completed its production launch and is live with a new industry use case, to meaningfully enhance and improve the market’s settlement exception resolution process.  AccessFintech has partnered with four leading investment banks in this effort.

Citi, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan have jointly launched an industry-wide collaboration workflow utilizing AccessFintech’s  Global Data Network, focusing on settlements and supporting multiple asset classes.

AccessFintech’s Global Data Network is a service where banks, custodians, buy-side, fund administrators and other interested parties can externalize data, agree on fail resolution parameters, visualize settlement breaks and prioritize and share their exceptions across the industry. The aim of the initiative is to reduce resources and improve resolution times in the settlements process.

“Exceptions” are transactions that are entered into a financial institution’s system, but fail to process. Settlement fails are expensive and slow to process, investigate and resolve, the cost of which is due to grow with the enforcement of forthcoming Central Securities Depositaries Regulation (CSDR) regulations. AccessFintech provides a solution which resolves errors in the complicated and fragmented trade settlement process, by providing a seamless tool at the operating level of financial institutions.

Roy Saadon, CEO of AccessFintech, said: “By creating a shared workflow, all counterparties across the trading and settlement ecosystem will benefit through reducing time for exception resolution, offer better client servicing, minimize sanctions and ultimately reduce costs. We are continuously expanding the use case of the service where collaboration can maximize efficiencies across the market and the settlement resolution space is an example of that. All business processes are industry neutral and delivered open access, and market participants are providing their input to create standard workflows.”

Steve Morgan, Head of Markets Operations Solutions at Citi said: “The current settlement process involves many participants to bilaterally clear trades. When trades do not settle on time, or process with exceptions, you can have as many as five establishments involved in the manual resolution which takes place over a chain of emails. We are excited to see the AccessFintech solution working in this space and to be a part of the increased collaboration across the industry. There are tremendous opportunities here for transparency, automation and greatly improved service for our clients.”

Tom Damico, Global Head of Equities Operations at J.P. Morgan commented: “We are always looking for better industry collaboration tools to improve the efficiency of our post trade process, reducing costs for both market participants and our clients.  The ability of AccessFintech to enable multiple firms and buy-side participants to share information real time and clear post trade exceptions in a controlled and cost effective manner is a critical step along that path.”

Brian Steele Managing Director, Global Head of Market Solutions at Goldman Sachs, said: “Goldman Sachs continues to focus on enhancing our front-to-back client experience through innovative solutions and collaboration with industry partners. AccessFintech is supporting this industry transformation by moving away from email and into a digital, data-driven environment across post-trade exception management.”

Karen Newton, Head of Global Markets and Investment Banking & Capital Markets Operations at Credit Suisse, said: “Alongside our peers we have successfully implemented a workflow between Credit Suisse and other participants via the AccessFintech UI, which enables us to radically improve the management and resolution of exceptions across the industry. We are very excited to leverage this sophisticated technology and view it as a key component of the future exception management process.  Ultimately, we see this as a tool to better serve our clients and we look forward to collaborating to support further adoption.”