Associate - Middle Office Operations (Open for Fresh Graduates)

Position Purpose

BNP Paribas Prime Brokerage (PB) offers an impressive breadth and depth of services, providing clients with a fully integrated front-to-back solution and a global approach for financing, execution and servicing.

Prime Services combines the historical strength in traditional Prime Brokerage services – top rated in Securities Lending, Client Service, Capital Introduction and more – with the innovative DNA of the GECD franchise. This combination allows the anticipation of client needs and development of solutions to the problems they face.

Within this business, the PB Client & Trade Service team is part of Global Market Operations and is dedicated to providing a premium service to PB clients and Front Office acting as the single point of contact regarding post-trade management and daily operational activity across all asset classes. By leveraging the synergy from client services and trade support functions, the team is also coordinating production & issues solving with all internal Operations departments aiming to be more client-focus and to improve turnaround time, services quality and client relationship management.

Teams based in London, New York, and Hong Kong provide seamless solutions in multiple asset classes, ensuring clients benefit from local support and expertise as well as proactive management of their issues

Responsibilities

Direct Responsibilities

Product Scopes: CFDs, Equity Swaps, and P-notes

Its Primary Responsibilities Are

• To book and/or follow up all the trade operations instructed by front office for hedge fund clients
• To be the middleman to co-ordinate all information from client and Front-to-Back to ensure smooth processing and settlement is properly performed
• To perform day-to-day core trade support functions to Trading including trade validation, late trade booking, trade amendment and cancellation
• To handle any post-trade events such as corporate action adjustment, secondary event booking and notification
• To perform as an independent control team to strengthen all the control within Global Market Operations and to follow the escalation rule
• To assist, work closely and have frequent contact with Front Offices (Sales, Trading, Business Managers, Relationship Managers) or with the clients’ fund administrator or clients’ operation on any on-boarding process, ad-hoc requests and handle queries in a timely manner
• To ensure all information reported in the client portfolio are accurate and verified.
  
  

The team works closely with other Trade Support teams and Trading to ensure timely communication for any breaks identified. Main drivers are client service quality, independent control, operational risk safety and cost efficiency.

Trade Booking, Amendment & Validation

• Create and maintain swap templates
• Book late trade in Trade repository Systems
• Validate trade in Trade repository Systems
• Amend or cancel trade in Trade repository Systems post trade date
  
  

Reconciliations

• Reconciling incoming trades into the matching platform, and working with internal stakeholders and trading desk to reconcile mismatches to ensure trades are booked on trade date
• Investigate daily reconciliation breaks, internally (BO, finance, etc.) and externally (with clients), and explain the breaks
• Check FO/BO reconciliations are performed and breaks corrected in Trade repository Systems in a timely manner (if applicable & not covered by the reconciliation team)
• Investigating positional breaks, trade mismatches, confirmations/settlements break etc.
• Create, review, resolve and communicate all internal reconciliation reports and systems.
  
  

Trade Lifecycle Events

• Booking in Trade repository Systems for Corporate Action events
• Handle daily queries from other teams (such as BO and confirmation) and provide necessary information without delay
• Post trade allocation for Synthetic Prime Brokerage clients
• Compute and notify trade events (early termination, coupons)
• Rolling and terminating SWAPS before maturity.
  
  

Projects

• Create, analyze and communicate all KPI’s
• Participating in global projects related to BNPP PB processes improvements and in local projects related to systems migrations. Identify issues, raise enhancements and contribute to testing of requirements
• Active follow up on updating procedure documentation
  
  

Contributing Responsibilities

• Bring solutions to new business initiatives for development.
• Propose process improvements to improve client journey.
• Contribution to perform supervision on the outsourced services (if any).
• Bring Direct contribution to BNPP operational permanent control framework
• Minimize operational failure, including but not exclusively the risk of fraud by helping to devise and by implementing sufficient regular controls
• Ensure appropriate escalation to management and/or permanent control (or compliance as appropriate) as soon as an issue is identified.
• Comply with internal and external regulatory and compliance requirements
• Comply with the BNPP standards of Code of Conduct
• Comply with the BNPP IT Security policies
• Anti-Money Laundering / Financial Sanctions “AML/FS”) related duties: Operations are an integral part of the control framework including for AML/FS topics. In that respect, in performing your role you are expected to ensure adherence to AML/FS related Group Policies and execution of associated operational controls, and to promptly escalate any resulting hit for analysis and decision.
  
  

Technical & Behavioral Competencies

• Must have completed a bachelor’s degree in Business Management, Financial Management or Treasury Management, Accounting.
• Must have good communication skills and flexibility with work arrangement
• At least a basic understanding of financial markets and trading operations
• Proficiency in Excel, with programming skills (VBA, Excel, Access) is preferable.