Margin Reform has secured two new hires for its securities finance practice. Sakti Narayan and Yannick Lucas have joined as senior consultants with a focus on securities lending and repo. As part of their new roles, the pair will be assessing the suitability of clients’ securities lending programmes from a risk and investment guidelines perspective and identifying the intrinsic value in the lendable inventory.
Shaun Murray, Managing Director, CEO of Margin Reform confirmed that services will include offering end-to-end business process analysis for the design and development of the IT and operational infrastructure required to meet business objectives and regulatory obligations. Moreover, they will perform due diligence with regards to selecting third-party trading platforms, post-trade automation solutions and securities financing benchmarking data providers.
Narayan and Lucas recently managed the design, development, testing and implementation of a bespoke securities lending internal agency for a €500 billion German asset manager. Narayan is as an expert in securities lending business processing and optimisation, new operations design and implementation and project delivery services. He brings experience from various risk management roles at Deutsche Bank between 2011 and 2017 before which he held positions at Vanguard Strategy and Cognizant.
Meanwhile, Margin Reform says Lucas has long been supporting securities lending and repo initiatives as well as the evaluation and execution of operational programmes for asset managers. Previously, Lucas was the head of European fixed income sales at RBC before moving into research and consultancy.
Murray noted the criticality of this capability for clients over the coming years as the use of collateral continues to grow and end-users want to see better market colour, generate revenue opportunities and improve investment performance.
