Services
Outsourced Consulting Services
LightPoint can help our customers by offering them a variety of consulting services
- Market data assessment: LightPoint’s market data assessments help our customers streamline market data usage to reduce market data costs and to manage operational risk.
- Fractional CTO consulting: provision of CTO-level technology leadership and guidance for customers who are not large enough to justify a full-time CTO.
- Custom development work that leverages our Agile development teams in North America and Asia. These teams are experienced in the following business and technology areas:
Business Areas
- Hedge fund trading platforms for both hedge funds and fund administrators.
- Market data management systems for large sell-side clients.
- Arbitrage trading systems for buy and sell-side clients.
- Portfolio accounting and investor accounting systems for buy-side clients.
- Treasury and liquidity risk systems in the capital markets space.
- Low latency parallelized OTC pricing and market risk management platforms.
- Low latency parallelized CVA and credit risk management platforms. These systems utilized thin client GUIs, relational and Hadoop storage platforms, data visualization for analysis and reporting, distributed caching technologies, machine learning frameworks, automated QA frameworks, and containerized deployment tooling to enable continuous deployment in private and public cloud hosting environments.
Technology Areas
- Bloomberg market data interfaces, SAPI, DAPI and B-Pipe
- SIX market data interfaces
- Refinitiv market data interfaces
- Ice market data interfaces
- UX Development Environments: TypeScript, JavaScript
- Programming Languages: C, C++, C#, Java, Scala, and Python
- Distributed Caching Technologies: GemFire, Redis, Memcached
- Data Analytics Platforms: Databricks
- Machine Learning Tools: TensorFlow, MLflow, Pytorch
- Databases: Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, MongoDB
- Data Warehouses: Snowflake, Netezza, Exadata, SQL Server
- Big Data Environments: Hortonworks, Azure Cosmos, Amazon S3
- Dev/Ops Tools; Jira, Jenkins automation server, Git, GitHub
- QA Tools: Selenium, Robotium, Appium, Cucumber, Sikuli, Canoo
System Installation Services
Onboarding Services
LightPoint’s onboarding services begin before a customer signs up with LightPoint and continue until our customers are live with the system. Every customer is assigned an experienced onboarding professional to ensure that the experience is a positive one. Some of the services include
- Working with the customer, we complete a detailed on-boarding document that assesses our client’s order execution process and documents how that process will integrate with LightPoint’s system. It also examines the client’s Prime Brokers and Fund Administrators to work out any issues with sending and receiving start-of-day and end-of-day files.
- Integration with the market data that a customer will use to drive the pricing and accounting functions in the system.
- Working with the customer to decide the best approach for loading the historical accounting data into the Portfolio Accounting system. LightPoint has a complete set of tooling to automate this task.
Outsourced Operational Services
LightPoint has a high-touch and experienced operations group that works with clients to manage their day-to-day operations; we can take the lead role in managing a client’s operational tasks, including:
- Managing all position lifecycle events.
- Creating a robust and scalable operational infrastructure with efficient operational processes and procedures.
- Creating operations run-books and oversight procedures to ensure all tasks are completed accurately and on a timely basis.
- Creating procedures that ensure that all data that goes into the system is properly verified and reconciled.
- Outsourced Middle Office operations services include:
Trade Processing and Support
- Manage and review the daily trade blotter.
- Perform “end-of-day checks” and controls on all daily trades.
- Perform Trade Affirmation / Trade Matching.
- Create EOD trade files.
- Send EOD trade files to Prime Brokers, Custodians, Administrators, Investors, etc.
- Perform EOD trade file checks.
- Confirm that all trades were sent and that all Trade Files were received and processed by each counterparty.
Accounting/Shadow NAV support. Use our Portfolio Accounting module to:
- Provide shadow accounting services.
- Trial Balance reconciliation
- Review and verify Tax Lots
- Review and audit Unrealized vs. Realized P&L
- Calculate month end NAV.
- Reconcile NAV with the Administrator
- Reconcile all data (position, cash, trades) with the Administrator.
- Manage all income and expense accruals
T+1 Reconciliation Reports
- Two-way reconciliation from LightPoint’s Portfolio Accounting software versus the Prime Brokers.
- Reconcile Positions and verify Net Equity for all accounts (Positions, Prices, and Market Value)
- Reconcile all Cash Balances, Trades and Transactions.
T+1 Trade Break Resolution
- Identify “Street–Side” trade breaks.
- Communicate Trade Breaks to the trading desk and resolve the trade breaks in a timely manner.
Asset Servicing
- Asset servicing for all types of securities including Equities, Bonds, Futures, and Derivatives.
- Manage the Corporate Action process, including the processing of voluntary corporate actions.
- Manage the Options expiration, exercise, and assignment process.
Cash and collateral management. Use our Portfolio Accounting and Operations Management modules to:
- Verify all Cash Balances (Trade Date and Settlement Date Balances).
- Verify all daily interest income and expense.
- Verify Market Value at each PB/Custodian.
Financing (Swaps, Stock Borrow, etc.). Use our Operations Management module to:
- Verify all daily finance charges and accruals.
- Verify all swap financing charges and accruals.
- Daily review and VERIFICATION of borrow fees.
- Monitor rate changes for hard to borrow positions and communicate to client.
Margin Requirements / Purchasing Power. Use our Operations Management module to:
- Perform a daily verification of margin requirements.
- Review all margin calls.
- Verify the purchasing power for each broker.