Market Street joins testers for improved SMA comms

FWR Staff

27 February 2007

Back-office service provider joins Citigroup in support of DTCC initiative. Market Street Advisors has joined Citigroup's Global Transaction Services fund-processing unit, its brokerage unit Smith Barney and several so far unnamed vendors as pilot testers of the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation's (DTCC) centralized communication platform for separately managed accounts (SMAs).

Clumsy

As matters stand, connectivity between SMA managers, sponsors and and service providers relies on faxes, phone calls and old-fashioned paper shuffling. The DTCC's Managed Accounts Service is supposed to automate all that and link trading parties to a central platform through one connection.

"Investor funds will be put to work in a fraction of the time it takes now" as a result of the "virtually straight-through processing" built into the DTCC's SMA-communication platform, says Bevin Crodian, CEO of Edison, N.J.-based Market Street Advisors. "Our connection to DTCC creates a valuable interface that provides our clients access to a wide network of managed accounts participants, without having to create their own technology interface to the platform."

Market Street Advisors is an application service provider of middle- and back-office investment services to the institutional, high-net-worth and retail-investment segments of the fee-based investment consulting space.

Ann Bergin, general manager of the DTCC's Wealth Management Services group, calls Market Street Advisors "one of this industry's most respected service providers."

The DTCC is a New York-based holding company whose subsidiaries provide securities clearance, settlement, custody and information services. -FWR