What clients want from prime brokerage sites is relatively straightforward. They want to be able to check confirmations, identify and resolve problem trades before they fail, search for specific trades, allocate trades, and to be able to get questions dealt with, all as quickly as possible. The differences in functionality between web pages are therefore more limited than in most of the other categories.
Lehman Brothers’ post-trade services website covers all the basics. It is attractively designed and has a useful corporate actions tool. But where it really stands out is in its effectiveness and internal controls.
An internally built system enables the bank to net trades and to reconcile these with a third party. This advanced system, which is live in seven European markets, has helped the bank to reduce settlement volumes significantly, with a 98% gross-net trade compression rate. The system’s success in reducing processing issues and increasing netting has meant that the overall number of trades being booked by the bank’s internal trading system has fallen by nearly 50%.
Internally, the system enables back-office staff to monitor specific processes, and to identify delays and their consequences easily. The back office even has access to real-time graphs of hourly and cumulative volumes to monitor daily trends.