NOVA - Back Office Settlement System

NOVA is a back office settlements system developed by Capital Market Solutions and is marketed in Japan by The InVitesse Group.

As a real-time system, NOVA's reporting and enquiry facilities can further improve the speed and responsiveness of your operation. Enquiries can be performed on screen and reports and contract notes can be produced in real-time to avoid costly and unwieldy overnight batch processing.

Scaleable
As your business grows and the demands on your trading and settlement system increase, NOVA has the capability to grow at the same pace as your organisation. With its client/server tiered architecture, the system is fully scaleable to meet the business needs of any size firm.

High Volume Capabilities
This architecture also enables NOVA to process the highest volumes, irrespective of the number of users. Constant maximum throughput is guaranteed as the processing is spread throughout the system whether you have 5 or 500 users.

Simple Implementation
Installing NOVA is a straightforward process. Through the use of middleware tools, such as Meridian, and generic APIs, NOVA can be integrated with your existing systems without the need to custom build. Because of its client/server architecture and component based structure, the system can easily fit in with your existing technology strategy. Should your strategy change the system is flexible enough to change with you. With its familiar Windows look and feel, users can quickly identify with NOVA enabling them to pick-up and learn to use the system more effectively.

Straight Through Processing
Exception Processing
NOVA incorporates exception processing throughout the system including processing restrictions, exception based handling and standard tolerance checking.

Proactive Exception Management
A fully proactive Exception Queue Monitor enables NOVA to provide a consolidate view of all exceptions in the system on a real-time basis. Data is displayed in a Windows Explorer tree type format, providing the user with full drill-down capabilities to enable full details of exceptions to be viewed and dealt with quickly and easily. Using third party products, NOVA can be configured to generate email, pager or facsimile messages, when certain exceptions occur or when certain events are recorded against a transaction, meaning that users do not have to monitor the workflow system full time.

System Integration
NOVA can be easily integrated with any number of systems to provide a true Straight Through Processing (STP) environment within your operations. Using standard APIs and middleware, NOVA can easily integrate with front office systems for the real-time exchange of trade data. This means that from order entry, through to trade, confirmation, settlement and accounting, data need only be entered once in the system, increasing the efficiencies of your operation and reducing the risk of user error.

External Communication
Electronic interfaces to stock exchanges and clearing and settlement agencies are also fully integrated within NOVAs framework. This allows for real-time market execution uploads and automatic settlement and accounting of your securities processing, irrespective of where and when this takes place. This functionality has been built as a generic component to enable the rapid development of new stock exchange and clearing interfaces in the future. With the ability to accept information from a number of data feeds, NOVA is also able to provide full market price, interest rate, exchange rate, instrument master and corporate action data throughout the system.

Electronic Trade Confirmation (ETC)
With interfaces to vendors such as S.W.I.F.T. and OASYS, NOVA provides the automatic, real-time generation of electronic notifications to all related parties on completion of a trade. Transmission mediums include fax, telex, S.W.I.F.T, ETC and email.

Advanced Functionality
Order Entry
NOVA contains a separate, simple to use, order entry and management feature, allowing orders to be entered, routed and managed before being automatically passed to the trade capture component of the system. This provides users with a quick and easy way of managing the trade flows within the front office.

Advisor
The Advisor component within NOVA provides sales personnel with access to full details of their clients data. Within one desktop screen, the user can view details such as orders, portfolio holdings, financial transactions, contact and settlement details, in addition to a full history of all correspondence records.

Trade Capture
NOVA allows automated trade capture from any front office system, or alternatively caters for manual entry via a GUI trade capture screen. Trades can be entered individually or placed at block level. NOVA also allows the capture of market executions direct from the automated trading systems of many of the regions stock exchanges. It provides on-line reconciliation to cater for the rapid reconciliation of any outstanding executions, including catering for cross-currency transactions. NOVA additionally caters for hedging of FX exposure, on a back-to-back basis or booking of an outright FX transaction.

Settlement
The settlement functionality of the system is fully configurable depending on the instrument traded and the requirements of the counterparty or client. This process is supported by electronic instruction facilities such as SWIFT, Telex, fax and customised message transfer. Using automatic interfaces to clearing and settlement agencies, the ability to operate in both domestic and international markets is inherent. NOVA has the capability to automatically reflect local market conditions, such as settlement date rules and the calculation of local statutory charges. Setting up and maintaining payments to clients and counter-parties is a simple process. Pre-defined instructions fully automate the process enabling multiple payment types, direct payments to nominated third parties and share payments between different accounts within the system.

Accounting
Comprehensive client accounting functionality within NOVA allows real-time account enquiries to be performed, with the further capability to drill down to the original source of the data. The system additionally allows enquiries to be performed on basic trial balances, such as P&L and Balance Sheet, while real-time/on-line account statements provide a quick and easy way to view your up to date client positions.

Holdings
NOVA also provides functionality for brokers offering Custodian services to trading and non-trading clients, or firms operating on a Principal basis. These facilities include automatic position keeping and reporting, calculation of service fees, statements and automatic adjustments for corporate actions. Stock and cash accounting positions are updated on a real-time basis within the system, reflecting movements both in and out of accounts. NOVA fully supports multi-market, multi-currency, multi-company Agency and Principal trading, from trade entry through to the monitoring and revaluation of principal positions. Indeed, real-time position keeping underpins Principal trading to enable realised/unrealised profit/loss calculations, in conjunction with mark-to-market and cross currency valuations, to be monitored.

Corporate Actions
Corporate actions can be automatically uploaded into NOVA from external data feeds or manually if required. Processing is then fully automated to enable allocation to the appropriate account. A claims schedule has been incorporated into the system to deal with cases where an entitlement has been delivered to the wrong beneficiary.

Stock Lending
NOVA fully supports stock lending and borrowing, from processing the trade through to eventual return of the stock. This covers the entire receipt and delivery procedure of stock collateral against a loan.

Margin Financing
NOVA additionally contains sophisticated margin financing functionality allowing you to offer a margin financing service to retail clients. With the ability to track a margin portfolio against the loan limit and the market value of the collateral, NOVA provides all the functionality required to support this value added service. Key features of the system include stock and cash collateral, interest calculation on cash (debit and credit), portfolio valuation and margin calls (multi-market and multi-currency), configurable haircut calculations (at instrument and client level) and all available cash calculations.

Control
NOVA provides an extensive search engine providing a full view of the business information contained in the system. Featuring standard drill-down facilities, searches can be conducted at any point throughout the system based on a range of enquiry criteria. NOVA also features a full on-line audit trail, further enhancing the control of your operations.

Advanced Technology
Developed using object oriented techniques, and built upon a distributed object-client/server architecture, NOVAs key technology features include:

* Industry standard GUI screens
* Scaleability using multi-tier client/server architecture
* Network deployment and connectivity, both local and remote
* Internet integration
* XML based interfaces

Brochures

NOVA Back Office Settlement System (MS-Word)