Trading Room - Relations With The Back-office

Relations With The Back-office

In most countries the banking regulation requires a principle of independence between front-office and back-office: a deal made by the trading room must be validated by the back-office to be subsequently confirmed to the counterparty, to be settled, and accounted for. Both services must report to divisions that are independent from each at the highest possible level in the hierarchy · .

In Germany, the regulation goes further, a "four eyes' principle" requiring that every negotiation carried by any trader should be seen by another trader before being submitted to the back-office.

In Continental Europe, institutions have been stressing, since the early 1990s, on Straight Through Processing (STP), that is, automation of trade transmission to the back-office. Their aim is to raise productivity of back-office staff, by replacing trade re-capture by a validation process. Publishers of risk-management or asset-management software meet this expectation either by adding back-office functionalities within their system, hitherto dedicated to the front-office, or by developing their connectivity, to ease integration of trades into a proper back-office-oriented package.

Anglo-Saxon institutions, with fewer constraints in hiring additional staff in back-offices, have a less pressing need to automate and develop such interfaces only a few years later.

On securities markets, institutional reforms, aiming at reducing the settlement lag from a typical 3 business days, to one day or even zero day, can be a strong driver to automate data processes.

As long as front-office and back-offices run separately, traders most reluctant to capture their deals by themselves in the front-office system, which they naturally find more cumbersome than a spreadsheet, are tempted to discard themselves towards an assistant or a middle-office clerk. An STP policy is then an indirect means to compel traders to capture on their own. Moreover, IT-based trade-capture, in the shortest time from actual negotiation, is growingly seen, over the years, as a “best practice” or even a rule.

Banking regulation tends to deprive traders from the power to revalue their positions with prices of their choosing. However, the back-office staff is not necessarily best prepared to criticize the prices proposed by traders for complex or hardly liquid instruments and that no independent source, such as Bloomberg, publicize.