IHS Markit has partnered with Alpha Financial Software to deliver automated US agency mortgage-backed securities (MBS) clearance and settlement through IHS Markit’s thinkFolio investment management service.
IHS Markit will integrate thinkFolio with Alpha Financial Software's TBA Mortgage Master, which delivers automated workflows and straight-through processing capabilities for US MBS.
The US mortgage market represents one of the largest and most liquid segments of the fixed income universe, but it is also one of the most administratively intensive, says IHS Markit.
Without expert management and efficient operational platforms, buy-side firms can often struggle with MBS trade operations due to high-pressure manual processing, it adds.
TBA Mortgage Master was designed by Alpha Financial Software to optimise middle office processes for trading agency MBS, allowing institutional investors to keep transaction costs low and mitigate operational risk while enabling them to access all relative value opportunities across the agency MBS market.
Whether Alpha is actively managing long portfolios of mortgage pools hedged with TBAs, or passively managing against a benchmark, TBA Mortgage Master provides the tools, workflows and reporting insights to support all its MBS processing needs.
Brett Schechterman, global head of thinkFolio at IHS Markit, says: "Agency mortgage-backed securities will continue to play an important role in global fixed-income portfolios and we want to ensure our clients have all of the capabilities they need to support the asset class within thinkFolio.”
He adds: “To enhance our functionality suite and extend further into the middle office, we chose to partner with Alpha Financial Software because of their extensive experience with the asset class and ability to deliver a comprehensive solution to drive automation and efficiency for our clients."
Joe Kohanik, managing partner at Alpha Financial Software, comments: "When combined with thinkFolio's decision support and trading suite, TBA Mortgage Master will deliver everything fixed income managers require on a single platform to optimise their MBS trading strategies and mitigate operational costs."
