The new solution supports real-time transparency and collaboration across the post-trade lifecycle by pairing data to improve pre-matching accuracy and reduce fail rates. It also aims to streamline workflows, deliver actionable insights, and resolve exceptions in real time. 

Settlement netting builds on Synergy’s data platform, which will enable the normalisation, visualisation, and aggregation of transaction data. It allows participants to net obligations across repos, TBAs, cash transactions and other asset classes, with the goal of improving operational efficiency and liquidity management. 

The platform enables automated communication between clients and custodians via API, reducing the need for manual intervention. 

JP Morgan contributed to the use case development and provided input and refinement during the design phase with Citi.  

“We have partnered very closely with AccessFintech on this collaboration solution as we believe it will transform the smooth operation of the repo market,” said Anthony Fraser, global head of prime financial services operations at JP Morgan. “Integrating JP Morgan’s best-in-class operating model and workflow tools with AccessFintech’s state-of-the-art technology enables us to establish a model of standardisation, transparency and seamless communication. We’re committed to delivering solutions which drive enhanced settlement efficiency and result in better outcomes for our clients.” 

The netting programme, initially piloted in the €15 trillion EMEA repo market, matches transaction details centrally across trading counterparties, replacing manual spreadsheet calculations for netting obligations.  

It also supports structured counterparty communication through APIs or user interfaces, aiming to improve fail rates, reduce asset movements, and lower transaction costs associated with repo settlements. 

Jaime Healy-Waters, global head of cash equity middle office and EMEA cash securities settlements at Citi, said: “We are pleased to bring this important collaboration solution to the repo market with AccessFintech. We remain intensely focused on creating solutions that enhance our clients’ investment performance and success.” 

Additionally, the Synergy network uses AI-based tools to generate settlement netting candidates in real time and draws on historical data to inform counterparty behaviours, such as settlement performance and amendment rates. 

The Synergy platform captures data across securities, derivatives, alternatives, and payments, supporting data transformation and collaboration among network participants. 

Tom Granelli, head of netting product, Synergy at AccessFintech said: “We are continuously driving industry transformation to prepare and strengthen market operations for the future. We remain intensely focused on creating solutions that enhance our clients’ investment performance and success.” 

Granelli added: “Settlement Netting is another example of our deployment of the transformative Synergy network, enabling the ecosystem to magnify their operational effectiveness and reduce unnecessary manual processes.” 

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The shift to T+1 is expected to pose significant challenges for participants, with ample coverage surrounding project increases in fails rates and pressures for international participants linked to misalignment.

As a result, an anticipated impact of these challenges is increased capital constraints due to higher fail rates and operating costs.  

Funding and FX requirements are expected to be a more complicated challenge, especially for international brokers and investors operating across different settlement jurisdictions and time zones.

Read more: T+1 settlement: The seismic post-trade change impacting the trading desk

“BNY Mellon has the foresight to help clients across this challenging time in FX settlement,” said Roy Saadon, chief executive and co-founder at AccessFintech.

“Together, we can achieve T+1 settlement by collaborating as a unified ecosystem.”

BNY Mellon and AccessFintech are collaborating to address the expected challenges on the shift to T+1, providing clarity on the ‘predicted to settle’ status of securities trades.

AccessFintech’s clients will be able to instruct BNY Mellon to broker FX transactions based on these ‘predicted to settle’ insights before the end of the US trading day, helping enable the necessary liquidity for international clients trading US securities.  

“At BNY Mellon, we are laser focused on developing solutions that support our clients’ investment performance and success,” said Jason Vitale, head of global markets trading at BNY Mellon.

“Our collaboration with AccessFintech will provide clients the ability to leverage our recently launched Universal FX platform to fund their T+1 settlement activity in an efficient and transparent manner.”   

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Goldman Sachs veteran, Christopher Daur, left the investment bank to head up buy-side sales and relationships at AccessFintech. As part of the role, Daur will be responsible for strategy, product, and sales. He joined AccessFintech after most recently serving at Goldman Sachs in several roles across the bank’s various asset classes and global markets operations, most recently as a managing director focused on post-trade strategy. Prior to joining Goldman, he spent five years at JP Morgan in a range of operations roles.

Head of Europe for UK-based asset manager Federated Hermes, James Rutherford, has stepped down from his role to pursue a technology venture. Rutherford departs the investment management industry after 35 years to take on a more active role in SmartFrame Technologies, a venture which he has been chairman of for six years. He spent 19 years at Fidelity Investments as a European portfolio manager until 2006. Following his stint at Fidelity, Rutherford departed to co-found Sourcecap international, an investment management company for European equities which was later acquired by Hermes International. Following the acquisition, Rutherford spent the last 14 years as head of Europe for Federated Hermes.

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Christopher Daur has been appointed global head of buy-side sales and relationships, responsible for strategy, product, and sales.

He joins after most recently serving at Goldman Sachs  in several roles across the bank’s various asset classes and global markets operations, most recently as a managing director focused on post-trade strategy.

Prior to joining Goldman, he spent five years at JP Morgan in a range of operations roles.

“AccessFintech has made remarkable strides in a short period of time, with significant success in developing a platform engineered to address the challenges faced by financial institutions in data collaboration and insights. To me, our clients need to be at the centre of everything we do and look forward to working across the buy-side to bring long term strategic solutions to help them achieve their goals.”

AccessFintech secured a $60 million funding round led by Citi, JP Morgan and BNY Mellon in September last year, taking its total funding to $97 million since 2018.

The company said Daur’s appointment comes on the back significant growth of its Synergy Network, which it now claims has more than 100 buy-side institutions connected.

“Since the Synergy Network reached critical mass, buy-side adoption has been experiencing exponential growth. The opportunity to serve the buy-side’s strategic initiatives, especially in these turbulent times, is an area of focus for AccessFintech,” said chief executive officer at AccessFintech, Roy Saadon.

“The appointment of Chris will strengthen our buy-side engagement, capitalising on his exceptional expertise in post-trade and operations at major financial institutions. This strategic move underscores our relentless efforts to foster active participation and seamless collaboration among all network participants.”

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Additional investment was secured from Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and Dawn Capital.

The latest round follows a $20 million Series B in 2020, which brings the total capital raised by AccessFintech to $97 million since 2018.

AccessFintech is a global data management and custody company looking to transform post-trade operations though its Synergy Network, which allows clients to collaborate across and within organisations. Citi and JP Morgan, after a year-long collaboration with AccessFintech’s Synergy Network, reported a 30% reduction in trade fails and a 76% drop in email traffic for operational processes.

WestCap led this latest funding round and brings experience building and scaling transformational software for capital markets with companies such as BrokerTec and Tradeweb.

AccessFintech said it will use the secured funds to accelerate its growth as it expands its collaborative data management network to additional markets.

Kevin Marcus, partner at WestCap and former president of Ipreo, and Caroline Butler, global head of custody at BNY Mellon will join AccessFintech’s board of directors.

“We are fortunate to fuel our next stage of growth with partners that combine a highly regarded growth VC and global strategic investors,” said Roy Saadon, chief executive of AccessFintech.

“We share the vision of data being the catalyst for innovation and growth and the critical role AccessFintech plays as an essential provider of trusted data governance infrastructure. We are poised for a period of significant expansion and look forward to working with all our investors as we launch in additional markets.”

Over the past year, AccessFintech has formed a number of strategic alliances and collaborations alongside growth of its data collaboration network. In December, Deloitte and AccessFintech announced a strategic alliance to help financial institutions implement digital transformation. Elsewhere, AccessFintech and KPMG collaborated to aid financial institutions with digital transformation.

Following the rapid growth of AcessFintech’s Synergy Network, the firm expanded its asset coverage into the derivatives space. Fabrice Carrier, formerly of JP Morgan, was appointed as the head of its derivatives product line earlier this year.

“We’re excited to support AccessFintech’s growth and expansion,” said Caroline Butler, CEO of custody at BNY Mellon.

“This latest strategic venture reinforces our commitment to collaborating with leading fintechs and investing in emerging technology to transform the asset servicing space, as we look to expand and curate a digital ecosystem for clients.”

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Citi and JP Morgan have worked with AccessFintech over the past 12 months in a bid to achieve operational efficiencies through data and workflow collaboration.

The reductions refer to trades between Citi and JP Morgan across securities asset classes over this period.

AccessFintech launched its secure collaboration network Synergy three years ago to establish an ecosystem of connected firms including buy-side, sell-side, custodians, and vendors.

For JP Morgan and Citi, the initiatives focused on securities settlements between the two dealers, with specific emphasis on European markets as a prelude to the recently implemented CSDR regulation.

The settlement rules enforce penalties on failed trades and came into force on 1 February 2022.

“We are constantly looking for ways to improve our operations and technology through innovation and using the Synergy Network has allowed us to integrate into one solutions-oriented resource, resulting in more efficiencies for our colleagues and clients,” said Tony Vazquez, global head of securities settlements for Citi.

“AccessFintech’s Synergy Network provides streamlined, automated and flexible services that have helped us reduce the time spent on emails and operational processes and optimise the time working on securities settlements.”

Speaking with The TRADE’s sister publication last week, Pardeep Cassells, financial products at AccessFintech, explained that a deterioration in settlement rates over the past six weeks in Europe has seen banks landed with between €3-5 million in penalties related to CSDR rules.

She also noted how the trend is occurring on a global scale, however Europe is experiencing the most pain following the introduction of penalties under the settlement discipline regime earlier this year. 

The fintech, which tracks CSDR penalties flow through its network of tier one banks, buy-sides and 80 different custodians and prime brokers, said it saw $77 million in penalties during February and March as challenges were experienced from the outset. Since then, the rate of penalties has increased further, at least over the past six weeks, Cassells explained.

“Organisations who are using our infrastructure have seen fail rates reduce by 40% by openly sharing data and our ability to bring together different sides of the trades,” Cassells added.  

Tom Damico, head of global equity operations at JP Morgan, said: “This test period has demonstrated that enhanced data collaboration and shared workflows enable us to create a more efficient operating model with a significant reduction in the number of exceptions and follow-up emails.”

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Through the Settlement Discipline Regime – launched on 1 February – the organisation deemed to have caused a late match or a failed trade pays a penalty while the counterparty on the other side of the trade – the “wounded” party – receives that same penalty amount as a credit.

Pardeep Cassells, financial products at AccessFintech, believe that due to a lack of preparedness and the complexity of the regime,  many buy-sides firms aren’t seeing all of the penalty data that relates to them, both in terms of credits and debits.

The penalties range from 0.5 bps to 1 bps depending on the nature of the financial instrument involved and apply to securities which are either traded on an EEA exchange or cleared in an EEA central counterparty clearing house. 

Cassells has noted a deterioration in settlement rates over the past six weeks in Europe which has seen banks landed with between €3-5 million in penalties related to CSDR rules per month.

Subsequently, she believes that – logically – the buy-side should be receiving penalty credits “quite consistently”.

“CSDR, rather than introducing a punitive penalty regime where fines are paid directly to the regulator, launched a regime where the intention is to have the defaulting party ‘make good’ their trades with their counterparty,” Cassells explained.

“So on the buy-side they are not seeing the amounts come back as credits. We’re not seeing prime’s passing to buy-side, but that money should be trickling down,” she said. “There should be buy-sides reaping the rewards from that.”

Now, five months into the Settlement Discipline Regime, we are getting a clear picture of the challenges and shaky start the regulation has incurred.

Despite volumes not increasing noticeably – or spiking like they did in March 2020 – the industry has continued to face operational challenges in 2022, along with sanctions following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Cassells also pointed to SSI discrepancies along with data and linkage issues, as weighing on settlement failures.

In a recent interview with The TRADE’s sister publication, Global Custodian, Matt Johnson, director in DTCC’s digital strategy and platform management, explained: “We saw some CSDs not being able to calculate penalties, different custodians taking different views of providing daily fail data to their participants, and having no real unified, standardised way of that settlement network providing trade status messaging.

AccessFintech, which tracks CSDR penalties flow through its network of tier one banks, buy-sides and 80 different custodians and prime brokers, said it saw $77 million in penalties during February and March as challenges were experienced from the outset. Since then, the rate of penalties has increased further, Cassells explained.

The bottom line, AccessFintech noted, is that companies are either suffering losses because they aren’t resourced to investigate properly or they’re becoming less operationally efficient because they’re moving resources from core operations into penalty reviews.

“We shouldn’t be seeing these rates increase. Organisations who are using our infrastructure have seen fail rates reduce by 40% by openly sharing data and our ability to bring together different sides of the trades,” Cassells concluded.

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Carrier brings over 30 years’ experience in investment banking to AccessFintech, having previously served at JP Morgan in various senior management roles for close to two decades.

While at JP Morgan, Carrier served in both fixed income and equities operations, with a focus on derivatives.

In addition, he was involved in several of the bank’s strategic programmes and was responsible for industry wide initiatives developed to transform investment banking operations.

His appointment comes alongside the rapid growth of AccessFintech’s Synergy Network, which is now expanding its asset coverage on the platform.

Following the rollout of settlements, pre-matching, regulation (CSDR), loans and payments confirmations, the platform has now expanded into the derivatives space.

“AccessFintech Synergy has established an extraordinary network of connected participants, collaborating on data and workflow,” said Carrier.

“The challenges of the derivatives market, and the appetite for collaboration between buy-side, sell-side and vendors is at a perfect crossroads. I am thrilled to be joining AccessFintech to grow the derivatives franchise and be part of that innovation journey.” 

Speaking on Carrier’s appointment, Roy Saadon, chief executive of AccessFintech said: “In Fabrice we are fortunate to have gained an outstanding professional who has deep knowledge of the derivatives marketplace, and beyond, and a proven track record of innovation and transformation of the financial industry.

“Having established and gained traction and volume in several key product areas, it a clear next step for us to continue to build out the offer into derivatives, a $12.6 trillion  market.” 

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Aimed at resolving multi-party settlement fails, the solution is powered by Broadridge’s post-trade platforms and data, and incorporates AccessFintech’s cloud-based operations workflow model.

The news comes just two weeks after AccessFintech signed a similar agreement with collaboration and messaging platform Symphony.

AccessFintech has created a network of participants sharing financial data and standardising workflows over the past few years, collaborating with Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Credit Suisse, among others. Users utilise the network to collaborate on exception resolution, distribute data and onboard vendors to create a complete ecosystem for data and workflow management.

“In today’s banking environment, clients demand inventive yet robust solutions that can help reduce their costs and eliminate excessive complexity,” said Roy Saadon, CEO of AccessFintech.

“We are excited to partner with Broadridge, as we believe clients of both firms will benefit from a much-improved experience in multi-party workflow management and exception resolution. Further, we look forward to working together on other new solutions to create a more powerful and innovative ecosystem for the market.”

Settlement fails continue to plague the industry, with the issue heightened by COVID-19 related market volatility and incoming regulation in Europe.

The collaborative workflow solution between Broadridge and AccessFintech aims to provide operational efficiency, risk reduction and cost savings for banks, broker-dealers, prime brokerages and custodians and their buy-side clients.

“The volatility in the securities market over the past year highlighted the industry’s need for a more efficient settlement process that promotes market liquidity,” said Vijay Mayadas, president of capital markets at Broadridge.

“Broadridge’s partnership with AccessFintech aims to bridge operational gaps that currently exist in multi-party exception management with a collaborative approach, providing the sell-side with consistent, quality data and an automated workflow.”

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Previous investors JP Morgan, Citi and Goldman Sachs contributed to the round, taking the total raised by AccessFintech to $37 million since 2018.

AccessFintech said it would use the proceeds of the investment to fuel product development, accelerate innovation, and continue its go-to-market expansion and extent its partner ecosystem. 

“Partnering with and investing in FinTech firms as well as developing in-house expertise is essential to be at the cutting edge of financial services, as clients seek quicker and simpler electronic applications of previous processes,” said Stephen Bell, global head of FIC and securities services operations at Deutsche Bank. “We are pleased to be co-investing in AccessFintech who have proven experience, creativity and expertise in driving efficiency and solving problems in the context of the global capital markets.” 

AccessFintech, which originated from JP Morgan’s FinTech incubator, has onboarded some of the industry’s biggest banks to its post-trade platform since its go-live last year.  It recently extended its partnership with JP Morgan to deliver new real-time payment status and workflow solution for its buy-side clients. 

“We have been proud supporters of AccessFintech since their origins in our In-Residence programme and are pleased to support the next stage of their growth. We believe in creating better industry collaboration tools for our clients, our peers and ourselves so that the market as a whole can benefit from better efficiencies in post trade processes, and AccessFintech has demonstrated the ability to successfully deliver in the space,” added Richard Gordon, global head of securities services operations, JP Morgan.

The fundraising round was led by Dawn Capital, Europe’s largest venture capital fund dedicated for B2B software. Since launch, AccessFintech has already gone live with 10 financial products and is in proof-of-concept or live testing with another 11 products. 

Banks such as Citi, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan have launched in industry-wide collaboration workflow utilising AccessFintech’s global Data Network, focusing on identifying transactions that have failed to be processed, and to significantly reduce them. 

“Over the past two years our mission to evolve the financial industry operating model has gained significant traction and it is testament to the energy and skill of our team, the support of our clients and our wider network that we have reached this important milestone,” said Roy Saadon, CEO of AccessFintech. “We are also excited to have worked with JP Morgan, Citi, Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank in this round – they are important partners for us in our vision of collaboration to maximise efficiencies across the market.”

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