Industry analysis, product news, and thought leadership from Loffa Interactive Group's team of settlement technology and compliance experts.
Reducing DKs: When Missing Prime Broker Agreements Cost You Trades The Documentation Gap That Creates Settlement Failures—and How to Close It The trade was clean. Execution was correct. Settlement instructions matched. And it still got DK’d. The reason: the prime broker agreement documentation was missing. Not wrong—missing. The counterparty’s system couldn’t find the F1SA authorizing […]
The Quarter-End Confirmation Nightmare: When 30-Day Requests Pile Up Why Response Rates Tank and What Operations Teams Actually Need It’s the last week of the quarter. Your reconciliation team is staring at 312 unanswered confirmation requests from the 30-day mailing cycle. The response rate is hovering at 43%. Quarter-end is Friday. And someone just called […]
Automating Letters of Free Funds: Why Email and Fax Still Fail in a T+1 World The Operational Reality of Custodian Verification—and What Actually Scales It’s 3:47 PM on a Friday. Quarter-end. Your operations team is staring at 47 unanswered Letters of Free Funds. The custodian contacts you have on file are outdated—three people have left […]
Managing SIA-150, SIA-151, and F1SA Documentation Across Counterparties The Prime Brokerage Agreement Stack—and Why Spreadsheet Tracking Fails A prime brokerage agreement arrives with an outdated signatory. The SIA-150 on file is from 2019. The F1SA references an account structure that changed eighteen months ago. And you didn’t know until the trade failed. Prime brokerage documentation […]
How Broker-Dealers Automate SEC Rule 17a-13 Quarterly Securities Counts The 30-Day Mailing, the Contra Firm Problem, and What Actually Satisfies Examiners Every quarter, more than 3,300 broker-dealers must physically count and verify every security they hold. It’s called SEC Rule 17a-13, and it’s been around since 1971. In 2024 alone, firms paid millions in fines […]
What Software Do Executing Brokers Use for Regulation T Free Funds Verification? The Letter of Free Funds Process—and Why Most Firms Still Do It Wrong Rey Acosta opened a brokerage account in October 2023. By January 2024, that account held $2.00. Then, according to the SEC’s March 2025 complaint, Acosta initiated four ACH transfers totaling […]
Your Fax Machine Might Be the Biggest Hole in Your Security Why the ‘security’ of fax is mostly a myth—and what actually matters for protecting counterparty communications At DEF CON 26 in 2018, security researchers from Check Point demonstrated something that should have ended the ‘fax is secure’ debate permanently. They showed that with nothing […]
The Hidden Cost of Manual Confirmations: Recent SEC Actions Show Why Automation Matters How AU-330 Confirmation Failures Cost Firms Millions—And Why Smart Compliance Consulting Advice Includes Automated Solutions In October 2024, a well-established broker-dealer wrote two checks: $375,000 to the SEC for confirmation violations, and $393,000 in restitution to harmed customers. Their crime? A coding […]
The True Cost of Manual Compliance: Why Your Quarterly Securities Counts Could Trigger Million-Dollar Fines—And How Compliance Consulting Firms Prevent Disaster Every quarter, over 3,300 broker-dealers must physically count and verify every security they hold. It’s called SEC Rule 17a-13, and it’s been around since 1971. So why are firms suddenly paying millions in fines […]
2025 SEC Enforcement Priorities: How Smart Compliance Consulting Advice Can Shield Your Brokerage from Million-Dollar Penalties If you’re operating a broker-dealer in 2025, here’s a number that should keep you up at night: $600 million. That’s the amount the SEC collected in recordkeeping violation fines in just the past 18 months. And they’re just getting […]
When Compliance Becomes Your Competitive Edge: Modern Broker-Dealer Operations in the T+1 Era The Challenge: How T+1 Broke Everything It’s 4:47 PM on a Friday. Quarter-end. Your reconciliation team is staring at 312 unanswered requests from the 30-day mailing—and that number keeps climbing. Meanwhile, two executing brokers are waiting on Letters of Free Funds verification […]
The Recordkeeping Gap, Compliance Policies Meet Technical Reality and $456M in fines Record Retention Under Fire Earlier this month, FINRA hit Ally Invest with an $850,000 fine for a problem that sounds almost mundane until you see the scale: 22.6 million business-related electronic communications, gone. Not deleted on purpose. Not swept under the rug. Just… […]
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