Prime Brokerage Services Overload

Now that several of the Prime Brokerages are offering services to the Hedge Fund space, which is a great step forward over previous technology offerings, but this does not go far enough to providing a conistent and dare I say it a standard approach to how Prime Brokerages expose their services. 

If a Hedge Fund is dealling with a single Prime Broker then all is good, but this is not the norm, it is more usual for a Hedge Fund to utilize multiple Prime Brokers.  So for the Hedge Fund there is still the upfront and ongoing costs of interfacing with multiple Prime Broker services, this is far from ideal.

A previous posting of mine, discusses the idea of a service that takes the order/trade information from a Hedge Fund and routes it to the appropriate destinations, the Prime Broker, the Fund Administrator, and even perhaps DTCC, with the appropriate event based feed back mechanisms to the Hedge Fund, so that order/trade status and events can be acted upon. 

A Follow on from that posting, is aimed directly at the Prime Brokerage market, I would suggest that a set of standard protocols/API’s be proposed that could be implemented by any Prime Broker, and even Dealer/Broker, this would allow for the Hedge Funds to develop against a single consistant API, reducing upfront and on going costs, and would be the beginings of a more far reaching infrastructure that would make for a very compelling Hedge Fund technology offering by the Prime Brokers.

I am sure there will be more to follow on this topic.