Firoz Shaukat Ansari

• Lead a sizable corporate action validation, release, and claim reconciliation team for one of the leading global investment banks based out of the U.S. for their EMEA region.
• Ensuring that the pre-payment of all corporate action events is correctly reconciled before the pay date, and that payments are correctly made to the clients on the payment date.
• Ensuring that claims are processed on time, and accounts that have been paid or charged incorrectly are reconciled as a priority.
• Ensuring all documents (SOPs, FMEA, Process Maps) are created and updated regularly.
• Ensuring timely execution of all operational deliverables, as per the agreed quantity and quality SLAs.
• Stakeholder communication, relationship management.
• Resolution of any processing issues and liaising with other areas, including settlements, Trading Desk support, front and middle office, and technology, etc.
• Maintaining adequate control over outstanding risk items, suspense breaks.
• Preparation and presentation of weekly, monthly dashboards to senior management and clients.
• Defining KRA, and handling the performance appraisal of team members.
• Implementing best practices and automated solutions for increased efficiency and execution time.
• Managing resource onboarding and invoicing for the entire client engagement.

Key Skills.

• Client Communication; Relationship Building
• Additional Achievements:
• Traveled onsite to Glasgow (Scotland, UK) for training purposes and relationship building with clients.
• Received Value Award.
• Received Employee of the Year Award.
• Promoted to Process Manager.

• Corporate Actions (transited process from the USA to India)

Key Skills

• Prepayments
• Payments
• Post Payments.

Responsibility

• Working in mandatory and voluntary corporate actions.
• Processing prepayment checks, such as position, failing trades, client elections, corporate action details, etc.
• Checking corporate action details and announcements with multiple clearing houses, like DTCC, IDC, and Bloomberg.
• Restricting positions in the systems as per corporate actions requirements.
• Facilitating the timely execution of all operational deliverables as per the agreed quantity and quality SLAs.
• Reconciling and clearing all the breaks related to corporate action events.
• Handle close to 35-40 emails in a day, involving breaks, position breaks, and any other client's query regarding payment discrepancy.

Systems:

• PSS
• DTCC
• IDC
• Bloomberg
• Eagle Star.
• Eagle Go.

Additional Achievements:

• The process transited from the USA to India in the agreed timeline, with no errors.
• I received appreciation from the onshore team for processing operations in a timely and accurate manner.

Corporate Actions

Key Skills

• Prepayments
• Payments
• Post Payments

Responsibility

• Working in Mandatory and Voluntary Corporate Action.
• Review the letter report and save notifications as per ex-date, instruction deadline, and payment date.
• Review and authorize the elections made by the PM by the deadline -1 and send instructions to custody.
• Review and confirm market deadline reminders sent by custody and inform PM accordingly.
• Booking mandatory events on the ex-date, as per custody notification against Bloomberg.
• Playing a mediatory role between the portfolio manager and custody to perform smooth operation of corporate action events.
• Checking multiple data sources for event details confirmation, such as Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters, and RIMES, against custody notifications.
• Resolution of any processing issues and liaising with other areas, including the settlements team, trading desk support, front and middle office, and static data team.
• Performing dividend control on the ex-date and booking missing dividends.
• Checking dividends on ex-date, bonds, and coupon on pay date, early redemption as per issuer notification provided by custody.
• Resolving position breaks in daily reconciliation in the 'Simcorp Dimension' application and cash breaks on the 'Bank-match' application against payments made by custody.
• Facilitating the timely execution of all operational deliverables as per the agreed quantity and quality SLAs.
• Reconciling and clearing all the breaks related to corporate action events
• Handle close to 35-40 emails in a day, involving breaks, position breaks, and any other client's query regarding payment discrepancy.

Systems:

• Simcorp Dimensions.
• Bloomberg
• SBK Bank Match.
• Custody Portals.

Derivative Settlement.

Key Skills

• Futures and options.
• Swaps
• Collateral Management.
• Responsibilities
• Working for the settlement of futures, options, and swaps trades.
• Reconciling every detail of trades with counterparties, such as Trade Date, Settlement Date, Rate, Lots, and Securities, etc.
• Processing interest rate swaps, coupon payments on a daily basis, as per the agreement and rate decided by the traders.
• Reconciling each and every cash inflow and cash outflow related to the derivative settlement.
• Reconciling the daily movement of variation margin.
• Reconciling cross-currency swaps with documents provided by the counterparty, and sending them back with confirmation.
• Topping up the collateral account as requested by Custody, and recalling money from collateral accounts as requested by traders.
• Managing trader’s accounts with the custodies collateral account as report received from custody on daily basis.
• Reporting trade details on a daily basis to DTCC.

Apps and web platforms.

• Simcorp Dimensions.
• SBK Bank Match.
• Markitwire and MTM.
• DTCC.

Additional Achievements:

• Traveled to Onsite (Oslo, Norway).
• A) Identified 20 associates to travel onsite for end-to-end process understanding.
• B) Worked with various teams onsite, such as the Settlement and Fund Pricing teams, for a better understanding of the entire asset management process.
• C) Training received from the onshore team on recent changes and automation of the process.

Reconciliation:

• To reconcile each and every cash and stock break related to corporate action and derivative settlement.
• To reconcile the position of accounts with the position of the custodian side, and to book the necessary transaction as required, matching the position with custody.
• To reconcile the cash breaks related to Corporate Action, and to identify the discrepancy to book the necessary transaction or to reach out to the custodian.
• To reconcile the cash breaks related to coupon payments on derivative trades and close deals trades.
• To reconcile the collateral, this includes cash and bonds for derivative securities.

Key Skills

• Corporate actions.
• Capital market.
• Corporate Action Claims.

Responsibilities:

• Working in the Mandatory and Voluntary Corporate Action Payment Team.
• Checking and analysis of various types of SWIFT messages. i.e. MT564, MT566, MT568, and MT599.
• Check and validate all corporate actions on key dates.
• Checking that corporate action events are set up correctly and are good to release.
• Confirm the positions of entitled shares involved in the corporate action announcement.
• Confirm all details of corporate action events with the agent bank.
• Reconciling all the payments received from various modes.
• Liaising with the agent bank regarding the payment discrepancy.
• Reconciling all the breaks related to failing trades and validating them through the SAFE GUI.
• Checking the events that were correctly processed as per the checklist.
• Releasing corporate action events through the Scorpio application.
• Reconciling and clearing all the breaks related to corporate action events
• Notifying all the clients involved in the corporate action announcement regarding payment released or delayed.
• Handle close to 50-75 emails in a day, involving breaks, position breaks, and any other client queries regarding payment discrepancies.
• Clear all the risks involved in corporate action-related trades.
• Liaising with various counterparties for confirmation of payment for corporate action claims settlement.
• Preparing various reports, such as the risk pack and resource utilization report.

Achievements

• Spot Recognitions in eClerx.
• Promoted to Senior Analyst.