Andreas Roussos, Managing Partner of Point Nine, Speaks to The Silicon Review: ‘Our Cutting-Edge Trade Processing and Reporting Solutions Backed by a Team of Driven Professionals Allows us to Stay Ahead of the Upcoming Changes and Gives a Peace of Mind to Regulatory Reporting Needs’

“What makes Point Nine stand out from its competitors is its ability to access data from various systems, including customers’ in-house solutions.”

Post-trade processing and regulatory reporting are vital in ensuring compliance in both the private and public sectors. They help firms expedite trade confirmation, reduce clearing-related risk, and eliminate operational bottlenecks. Besides, post-trade processing allows the buyer and seller of securities to root-out and rectify errors.

Point Nine is an industry-leading team of experts specializing in trade processing and reporting. The firm uses its in-house proprietary technology to provide an in-class solution to all customers and regulatory reporting requirements.

The company is based in Limassol, Cyprus.

Point Nine: Synopsis

Rewind: From the Outset

Founded in 2002 as Point Nine Financial Technology, Point Nine works with both buy-side and sell-side firms to help them address the ever-expanding challenges of post-trade processing and regulatory reporting. The company’s initial strategy was to develop Financial Technology (“FinTech”) that would cater to the complete range of middle and back-office requirements of Investment Managers and Investment Funds. It spent a few years developing a state-of-the-art complete software solution, which concluded to shift the business model instead of licensing it to Investment Managers. The firm offered a comprehensive range of middle and back-office services to Investment Managers through its experienced professional personnel. The services were powered exclusively from Circle, which not only acted as the main central database, books, records for all the transactions, and portfolio life-cycle activity but also was interfaced with hundreds of other third-party service providers, such as Banks, Custodians, Brokers, Trade Repositories (“TRs”), Approved Reporting Mechanisms (“ARMs”), Regulators, etc., for the purposes of automatically receiving and sending any information that was required to fulfill all the Investment Manager’s obligations.

In 2019, Mitsubishi UFJ Trust and Banking Corporation acquired Point Nine to satisfy MUFG’s long-term goal of becoming a global leader and enhance the Trust Bank’s services and presence. Resulting from the acquisition, Point Nine Ltd was spun off to Point Nine Data Trust, the end-to-end multi-regime reporting solution. Since then, Point Nine has offered technology and managed services to more than 140 customers globally, including hedge funds, asset managers, brokers, and banks.

Initial Roadblocks

Entering into the RegTech Industry that is highly competitive was one of the challenges Point Nine faced, but solidifying the reputation the firm has today is indeed a milestone. Another roadblock the firm had to overcome was educating and convincing clients about cloud-based solutions such as theirs and assuring them cloud-based is the future.

Addressing Regulatory Reporting Requirements Profoundly

Point Nine’s success lies in its state-of-the-art proprietary cloud-based technology designed to help customers fulfill their regulatory reporting requirements, streamline their processes for storing, processing, and submitting data from various sources. The flexible architecture of its product includes multifunctional portal features that can report customer activities in real-time. Furthermore, what makes Point Nine stand out from its competitors is its ability to access data from various systems, including customers’ in-house solutions. The architecture has an automated way of fetching, receiving, or submitting enriched data while improving accuracy testing, performing advanced regulatory reconciliations, testing reference data, and having a proper control framework.

Going from Above and Beyond

‘Through our experience, we have learned that a robust data governance framework is essential for compliance with required regulatory provisions. Because every customer’s operational flow is different, we take an individual and personalized approach to work with each customer serving as the “bridge” between the regulator and customer which allows us to shape our technology solutions and become more adaptable to customers’ needs.’

Future Arrangements

Point Nine has been growing and gaining momentum even amidst the Pandemic. This year, it expanded with a Business Development Manager in Luxembourg, later in London, and expanding to Frankfurt and Dublin. Aside from the growth of the team and business, they are expanding their portfolio to products and aiming to release a tool for iFRS-9 and iFRS-16 + 17. Besides, the company is constantly monitoring regulators and regimes as well as the market. Point Nine is 24/7* vigilant to tackle needs deriving from such changes.

Inspiring Success Stories

1. The Issue: Trifold uses multiple trading platforms, servers, hubs, bridges and CRMS. Hence, their data are stored in different sources, and different logic is applied on each source. Their previous provider messed up with the complicated logic and reported wrong data.

The solution: Our system can gather all the data into one place and apply any rules stated by the client in order to export accurate data.

2. The issue: Wrong data reported (extremely high volume, wrong mapping of counterparties, wrong outstanding positions, trades that never got reported, etc.

The solution: Discussed with the client the logic that they use for each counterparty/client on each trading platform and hub, implemented our system accordingly and proceeded with corrections (error out and resubmit) everything since inception.

3. The issue: Client has several LPs with which they need to match the UTIs. They never achieved this.

The solution: We contacted all their LPs and found out what is the methodology each LP uses. We managed to correct all the back-dated transactions and match them with their LPs. We even identified an issue one of their LPs had on their UTI methodology and “forced” them to change it and correct their data. We also managed to share our UTI methodology with all their legal entity clients.

4. The issue: NCA identified wrong outstanding positions for a company. They approached us to help them correct their data.

The solution: We built a custom reconciliation tool especially designed for this client, got all their back dated transactions, ran our reconciliation tool to find out the difference between the submitted transactions and the actual executed transactions, corrected any wrong reported information, re-submitted the problematic transactions and submitted any transactions that may have been missed.

We managed to match the outstanding positions they actually had with the outstanding positions reported to the NCA.

The Distinctive Leader at the Helm of Pont Nine

Andreas Roussos is the Managing Partner of Point Nine. He is a versatile financial, business, and operations executive with an extensive portfolio of leadership successes across a wide range of organizations, including highly regulated functional platforms. Mr. Roussos is committed to excellence while driving the optimal allocation of resources and talents.

“Our success lies in our state-of-the-art proprietary cloud-based technology designed to help customers fulfill their regulatory reporting requirements, streamline their processes for storing, processing, and submitting data from various sources.”