Every modern bank invests in financial instruments to improve its own rentability or to limit risk. For some banks those instruments are exclusively for its own needs, but more and more often the bank is becoming a basic channel enabling trading in securities for a wider group of customers, especially institutional ones. This happens as subjects whose investment needs reach a little further than what the classical broker office and stock market can offer them, expect an efficient and customized service, covering safekeeping and trading in securities of a different character, through the mediation of one institution - the custodian bank.

The customer, apart from good relations with a bank’s employees, awaits all his settlement instructions, ordered over the phone or increasingly often through electronic media, to be processed quickly and faultlessly, and that he will be provided with the certainty of a settlement by the bank. A second essential element is reliability, the range and the time of delivering the information to the customer about activities or events essential for his investment portfolio. In the case of institutional customers, a suitable level of service is often a necessary condition for gaining the customer over. To profit from running custody accounts the bank must accumulate a sufficiently wide portfolio of customers, and simultaneously retain the tool with which thousands of settled transactions daily will permit him to automatize this process to a maximum, react efficiently to new customers’ needs and simultaneously fulfil the requirements placed by central depositories, supervisory institutions and legislators.

Already in the 1990s Comarch offered, in the Orlando line of products, a system for book-keeping and recording turnover on securities within the service of running a custody account by the custodian bank. By selling the back-office custody system in many Polish banks, we gained experience which enabled us to constantly develop and modernize our product. Its latest version permits among other features i.e.:

• Recording and book-keeping transactions on securities kept in the Polish depository and clearing house KDPW (in  full concordance with NSDR), National Bank of Poland, foreign depositary institutions and at agents of non-public issues of short-term debt papers
• The processing of corporate actions and operations on securities (interest payments, full or partial redemptions, dividends, split, assimilation, etc.)
• Automated processing of SWIFT instructions (customer settlement instructions concerning transactions and corporate actions, the SWIFT communication with foreign depositary institutions, status reporting on transactions or corporate actions , reconciliation reporting)
• Automatic data exchange with depositary institutions (NSDR xml, El-Bon messages, SWIFT)
• Import of transactions from bank trading and treasury systems
• Data exchange with auxiliary systems (the general ledger system, GIIF, the external base of customers, the WWW portal, etc.)
• Commission calculation (own or intermediaries)
• Meeting the duties inflicted by supervisory institutions and the law (series of reports, calculation of a “compensation system”, capital gains)
• Easy access to data on processed transactions and operations on securities and related reports and interfaces.

See also our product Comarch ESDK+ and our offer for brokers.