Société Générale Gets Cheuvreux Back Office

The back office of Crédit Agricole Cheuvreux has been outsourced to Société Générale Securities Services (SGSS), after the former was acquired by Kepler Capital Markets to create Kepler Cheuvreux, an equity broker.

The migration of the back office to SGSS took six months and involved opening thousands of SGSS accounts for Cheuvreux's clients, ensuring the correct reference data was available and that all legal and regulatory requirements were met. SGSS employed a team of 40 on the migration project.

"It was a very large project," says Guillaume Heraud, SGSS's Paris-based global head of business development, financial institutions and brokers. "We are talking about several thousand accounts that had to be opened, and the processing of this settlement being centralized in Paris and then using several SGSS units across Europe and other locations. It was a matter of making sure that all sub-custodians and clearing agents were completely aligned with all the processes and completely aware of our timelines."

SGSS, which has been working with Kepler for four years, will now provide a customized clearing and settlement solution to Kepler Cheuvreux that is capable of handling high volumes of transactions for the firm's equity business in 29 markets.

Heraud says the industrialized processes that SGSS has developed for clearing and settlement mean its per-trade costs are low. However, he points out that SGSS's services are also customized to meet the needs of individual firms.

"Part of our organization has this processing which has been industrialized to a very high extent, but we also have client support teams whose mission is to understand and support the client during the migration process, of course, but also to make sure we can deliver operational processes which are adapted to what the client is looking for," says Heraud.