A consortium of banks including Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Barclays Plc are tapping an outside startup to help with their efforts to ensure they’re properly disclosing clients’ bets across different markets.
Endoxa, a newly-formed group that also includes BNP Paribas SA and HSBC Holdings Plc, enlisted the financial technology upstart Droit to help develop a Position Reporting Utility, according to a statement. The goal is to improve the quality of the way financial firms disclose clients’ long and short bets across markets.
“They are getting our help to facilitate the correct and timely reporting of those positions,” Brock Arnason, chief executive officer of Droit, said in an interview. “The hairier problem is understanding how you actually count individual positions when you’re a financial institution. As in, which ones are you holding for collateral purposes? How do you net those off against each other across entities?”
The banks are teaming up as regulators around the world have sought to increase the amount of disclosures that hedge funds and other asset managers have to make about their investments. The Securities and Exchange Commission, for instance, has been writing new rules that would require more disclosures on certain types of derivatives after the trader Bill Hwang used them to amass huge positions that ultimately sank his family office Archegos Capital Management, revealing a regulatory blind spot.
Here’s how the new Position Reporting Utility is meant to work: The Endoxa consortium, along with the law firm Allen & Overy, will review disclosure rules across key jurisdictions and develop a consensus view on how those obligations should be met. Droit will take that and turn it into a model that banks can use to more easily understand what kind of reporting obligations they’re dealing with on any given trade.
“Creating this consortium will enable us as financial institutions to more effectively and efficiently navigate the regulatory complexity of the global position reporting rules while retaining each firm’s ownership of the underlying risks,” Richard Hempsell, global head of core operations at Goldman Sachs, said in the statement. “The platform will drive unified standards and support transparent, consistent compliance across the industry.”
