After nine months of discussions, global asset manager Pimco is rolling out a suite of due-diligence and client on-boarding tools from financial data and software vendor Markit.
The institutional investor has selected to use every component of the vendor’s regulatory and compliance ecosystem to automate the hundreds, if not thousands, of request for information every month, according to Darren Thomas, managing director and head of Counterparty Manager at Markit.
“We are replacing the inefficiency of phone calls, emails, snail mail, and manual work,” he said. said. “We are automating that through a central utility, which brings all that data together.”
Thomas estimates that it should take the asset manager a matter of weeks to be up and running on each offering.
“After that, we’ll support their due diligence over the long term for any new funds they launch or any type of activity they have going forward,” he said. “We are already reaching out to a number of banks and brokers to let them know that Pimco would like them to pock up their due-diligence services through the platform.”
The hosted offering includes know-your client, anti-money laundering, request for amendment, legal, and negotiation tools as well as a tax utility for the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act and a secure document-exchange service.
Once Pimco has completed its implementation, it will access the tools via a secure Web browser, according to Thomas. “We have a series of API services, which Pimco has not selected to use currently.”
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