Content area
Full Text
Lasswell has served as senior v.p., chief operations officer and chief compliance officer of Wells Fargo Brokerage Services since December 2000.
Mark Lasswell
Lasswell has served as senior v.p., chief operations officer and chief compliance officer of Wells Fargo Brokerage Services since December 2000. He has held various positions at Wells Fargo and its predecessor banks, managing groups in Norwest Bank's mutual fund/collective trust funds area and in Norwest Investment Services' accounting and finance areas. He served as director of compliance for Norwest Investment Services for five years.
What do you see as the most pressing straight-through processing issue facing the industry?
Within Wells Fargo, we are the institutional broker/dealer predominantly selling fixed-income securities to money managers, corporations and insurance companies. The biggest STP issues facing an institutional broker/dealer specializing in fixed-income securities are automation, speed of processing and accuracy. Overall, we are trying to achieve efficiencies to lower our costs per trade. Firms are typically using multiple systems to process and settle trades, and figure out a way to get all of these systems to talk to one another to achieve STP.
There are a lot of fixed-income securities that we would consider plain vanilla, like municipal bonds. But there are some really complex securities. There is the need...