Enhanced Pricing Reports Pay Off for BNY Mellon Asset Servicing

The growing complexity and volume of data in the pricing space following the financial crisis has resulted in firms such as BNY Mellon expanding pricing operations.

Market volatility and the use of more sources can lead to a high number of exceptions, and to ensure the team can deal with these efficiently, BNY Mellon has developed additional market reports, covering securities prices and market trends, which are circulated internally to assist subject matter experts in the pricing process.

The reports are used to compare and contrast data, and can highlight issues such as missing or stale prices. They also look at how the data relates to what else is happening in the market.

Boston-based Kerry White, managing director, global product management at BNY Mellon Asset Servicing, says: “We’ve added additional data points [to the reports] and made them more universal.”

“We want to be able to have the pricing specialists look at exceptions,” she says, explaining that using the reports simplifies the exceptions process.

The reports are updated every day, and they are used more than once a day if a client takes prices on an intra-day basis.

Meanwhile, White says the two most important aspects of risk mitigation in the pricing process are knowledge and technology. A firm has to ensure that both the knowledge base and the technology is there, she explains.

To produce the market reports, the group relies on technology to run queries on the pricing database, pulling out exceptions that can be identified in the reports.