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Fragmented sourcing

Liquidity sits across many counterparties and channels, so covering a short means working several relationships at once. Each lender prices and holds its own book, so there is no single view of where supply actually sits. Time spent polling contacts is time the position stays uncovered.

Hard-to-borrow gaps

In specials and hard-to-borrow names, supply is thin and prices move fast, so locates are hard to confirm on demand. A name can go special intraday, and a rate quoted in the morning is stale by the afternoon. When a locate falls through, the client trade waits or the desk takes on risk to fill it.

Manual, time-pressured workflow

Voice and chat sourcing can't keep pace with client demand, and every manual step adds delay and risk. Traders re-key the same details into email, chat, and booking systems, which invites errors. As volumes rise, the desk hits a ceiling it can't staff its way past.

Late-breaking mismatches

Trade and settlement detail breaks appear near the deadline, leaving little time to fix them before they fail. Quantity, rate, and SSI differences often surface only when instructions reach the custodian. By then the team is chasing the counterparty against the clock instead of preventing the break.

SFTR & CSDR penalty exposure

Every fail can draw a SFTR or CSDR penalty, so a single break costs real P&L. Penalties accrue daily until the trade settles, so a stalled break keeps charging the desk. Tracking and contesting each charge adds its own operational load.

Shrinking settlement windows

T+1 compresses the time to match, reconcile, and resolve returns and recalls, so manual processes fall behind. Work that used to span two days now has to clear in one. Returns and recalls that miss the cutoff turn into next-day fails.

No single intraday view

Required values and market moves change through the day, but exposure data is scattered across counterparties and systems. Each tri-party agent and counterparty reports on its own schedule and format, so the desk reconciles by hand. Without a live picture, coverage decisions lag the market.

Collateral discrepancies

Mismatches in mark-to-market and required value appear across counterparties, so claims and margin drift out of line. One side's valuation rarely matches the other's to the penny, and the gaps compound across a large book. Resolving each disputed mark takes calls, spreadsheets, and time.

Trapped capital

Without timely coverage and release, the book stays overcollateralised and capital sits idle. Collateral pledged against closed or reduced positions does not come back fast enough. That idle balance is funding the desk could deploy elsewhere.

Overlapping regimes

SFTR, SEC Rule, and 10c-1a each demand their own accurate, on-time trade data from the same desk. The regimes overlap in subject but differ in fields, formats, and deadlines. Meeting all three from one set of trades means three separate reporting paths.

Enrichment burden

Each regime needs enriched fields and matched identifiers, so reporting means heavy data preparation. LEIs, UTIs, and counterparty references have to be sourced, matched, and validated before anything can be filed. A single missing field can reject an entire submission.

Scattered data flows

Trade data lives across multiple systems, so meeting each deadline risks a separate build and reconciliation effort. Booking, settlement, and collateral records sit in different platforms that were never built to report together. Each new rule risks yet another integration project.