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Note: Now two large broker/dealers -- Smith Barney and UBS -- and four investment managers are using the service, which automates interactions between managers and brokers of managed accounts.
UBS has begun testing the DTCC's Managed Accounts Service, a system that shuttles account information between investment managers who manage accounts and their broker dealers (who in this setting are often referred to as "sponsors"). Along with UBS, four investment management firms that outsource their back-offices to Citi Global Transaction Services are testing the service along a new portal from DTCC that gives investment managers a view of all their accounts across all their sponsors. (The portal was actually developed by software partner Peridrome.) Thirty-four other investment managers are at various stages of considering the Managed Accounts Service.
The DTCC rolled out the Managed Accounts Service almost two years ago, in October 2008, with Smith Barney as a sponsor and Citi Global Transaction Services as a managed account outsourcer, at the behest of the Money Management Institute, which wanted to create a standardized way for sponsors to open and manage accounts and handle transactions with money managers rather than money managers having to cope with various sponsors' proprietary back-office systems.
The addition of UBS as a second and the introduction of the portal were driven by money managers' requests, according to Brett Ginter, strategic consultant at DTCC. "The investment managers said, bring...