CIC Market Solutions offers an outsourced execution service to asset management companies. Jean-François Fournier, Head of the Buy-Side Desk, details this offer below as part of our Let's Go CIC Market Solutions series, designed to present all our expertise and know-how.

Interview with Jean-François Fournier

Presentation

Regulations such as MiFID II or CSDR, and the complex functioning of financial markets, are an incentive for firms to separate their asset management and execution activities.

Moreover, for an asset management company, an in-house execution desk involves significant human investment and sophisticated and expensive infrastructure, not to mention operational and compliance risks.

This is why CIC Market Solutions offers asset management companies an efficient outsourced order execution solution via its Buy-Side Desk.

Which solutions do you offer ?

We are involved in the entire execution value chain with a constant focus on quality for our asset management company clients : liquidity research, execution management, market intelligence.

We also handle our clients' best selection regulatory obligations, or management of their relations with counterparties and their execution rating.

If our clients wish, we will also assist them in preparing their annual counterparty reviews.

Lastly, we provide them with reports giving them an exhaustive view of the trading venues used, access conditions and counterparties, costs, and any anomalies detected.

What is your value added ?

We enable our clients to improve the performances of their funds by reducing the implicit costs, such as the market impact, spreads and opportunity costs, as well as explicit ones, such as execution costs. Our Buy-Side Desk also lowers clients’ operating costs by pooling them, thus reducing fixed costs tied to reporting, trade reconciliation, and the cost of trading systems.

CIC Market Solutions’ desk is a bank desk, meaning that it it has all the necessary trading and execution authorisations. It can provide services in broker matching and, especially, settlement-delivery instructions matching.

Our automated circuit allows us to offer a unified audit trail and ensures greater security.

On the eve of the entry into force of the third pillar of the European CSDR, this is a guarantee of efficiency and cost control.

How would you sum up the interest of our Buy-Side Desk offer ?

At a time when regulatory and cost constraints are high, outsourcing orders to our Buy-Side desk allows our asset manager clients to better define their roles and to focus on their core business – asset management – while improving execution performance and limiting costs.

We look forward to working with asset management companies to put in place their outsourced execution desks.