Fidelity-owned National Financial has launched three new services to assist broker/dealers.
"Broker/dealers continue to face numerous business challenges, ranging from regulatory pressure to increasingly sophisticated client needs, and are demanding that their clearing firm offer more than just traditional services like trade execution," said the Scottsdale, Az.-based subsidiary's president and chief executive, Norman Malo.
To cater to those clients, National Financial, in partnership with New York-based Minigham & Oellerich, will offer a new data aggregation program, which will allow broker/dealers to view firm-wide sales and management information. Although the program can show only data from National Financial, not other institutions, it includes information about customer accounts, compensation, direct business, compliance, and journals and accounts. Malo noted that while National Financial would prefer its clients consolidate their holdings into one brokerage, doing so is sometimes impossible. Still, at-once access to such information will help companies better comply with regulatory and reporting requirements.
Through a multi-year relationship with Finetre, an annuity services company in Herndon, Va., National Financial will offer clients streamlined annuity applications processes and improved compliance.
Finally, National Financial announced it will offer Reuters Station, workstations that channel market data, fundamentals, analytics and real-time market access to institutional clients. National Financial has more than 70 institutional clients who, on average, make 102,000 trades daily. "Reuters Station adds to our institutional offering and will offer our clients access to another established desktop market data solution," Malo said.
"We have made significant investments on our platform over the past few years to ensure we are offering our retail and institutional clients access to what we believe are the best-of-breed technologies, products and services--both proprietary and through third-party alliances--they need to help drive growth, create efficiencies and manage risk," Malo said.
