MASS Committee
Meeting Minutes
Date: 8/18/10
Written by: Hanna Salvatore Time: 1:00
Type of meeting: Steering Bridge: 1-877-879-8153
Attendees:
Jay Artz Gary Jones
Colby Payne Hanna Salvatore
Gib Veconi
Committee Business
Agenda items
New Action Items
Open Action Items from Previous Meeting
2010 Goals
We commenced the meeting by discussing some of the crossover from the Cost Basis group to the Standards Committee:
The cost basis group is meeting on the 30th and there are item from that group that will need to be brought into the scope of the other groups. Specifically:
- The methodology for identifying tax lots and covered vs. uncovered positions. This issue will likely impact AOM, trading, and recon.
- Methods for identifying default tax lot types. Should impact AOM and might impact trading. Heeren is co-chairing the Cost Basis committee and would like the MASS committee to be aware that we will likely play a role. The mandatory adoption of these regulations in 2011 is coming up fast. Although it mostly affects custodians and broker dealers, they will need to get up to speed and will likely involve Investment Managers as well. There are no sharply defined parameters on how tax lot information is communicated. This has always been a unique selling point for SMAs in that you can control your tax destiny. On August 30, at 1:00, this meeting has been scheduled on the MASS calendar for every other week.
Account Origination and Maintenance: Gib reported that we are documenting the schema with annotations. The first pass has been completed and is being reviewed among the committee members. This will be useful for firms that are implementing the standards. We are also reviewing a list of reject reason codes, trying to make it easier. We are categorizing and paring down the reason codes. Some new reject codes has been added as well. The results of those conversations can be found the MASS site under Forums – Review and Refactoring Reject Codes.
Reconciliation: Jay reported that the group was talking about cost basis, transactions and positions by tax lot as well all the other data elements – these will soon be ready to publish to a wider audience shortly.
Trading: Colby reported that the committee has gotten through the Vestmark FIX specifications. We are trying to get a formal best practice recommendation from FIX especially the versus purchase functionality. The FPL blessing is needed. Nick is looking for participants on a trading panel and Lisa Ti is working from the FPL side. We need her input on this lot identifier issue in a FIX message. Gary is trying to coordinate this with her. The next steps are adoption up to and including getting firms to say that they have adopted the standards.
Models: Models and Billing are supporting each other. We do not know how the model is being used; therefore we need reporting of activity and volume. It does ask for some details, we are trying to coordinate this. Jim Penman provided another version of the schema. The TWG will look at the schema and get it cleaned up and lined up with the business requirements. We will try to book something next week. We are going to try to implement homework type assignments rather than trying to do the work on the call.
The website is up and running. The repeat pattern was difficult to get going.
The meeting adjourned at 1:29.