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Custody & Clearing
Regulated environments where trust, compliance, and operational resilience are non-negotiable.
State Street
BNY Mellon
Northern Trust
Pershing
Inside this journey
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Pre-Discovery
Align decision-makers, timelines, and procurement readiness before detailed evaluation.
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Stakeholder Alignment
Confirm decision roles (COO, CFO, Head of Ops, Compliance), timelines, success criteria, and reference-check plan.
Alignment Questions
Quick Introductions — set the room
- Which best describes your role in the custody evaluation today?
- How long has your team worked with your current custodian or clearing provider?
- What is the primary motivation for exploring a new custody/clearing relationship right now?
- What would you say is the single most important outcome you need from a new custodian (in one short sentence)?
- Who will be the ultimate signatory or approval owner for a custody mandate in your organization?
If One Settlement Slip-up Could Cost You — what's at stake?
- Imagine a single settlement failure cascaded into client losses or a public regulatory inquiry—how real is that risk for you today?
- Tell us about a time when a custody or settlement error affected your firm—what happened and who felt the impact?
- How often do custody exceptions or failed settlements meaningfully disrupt operations or client reporting?
- When incidents occur, what are the top three consequences you worry about most?
- How do these incidents typically make you feel as a leader—frustrated, defensively prepared, scrambling to contain, or something else?
Where Your Current Setup Actually Breaks — a candid mapping
- Which parts of the trade lifecycle give you the most headaches today?
- Walk us through a recent example of a failure in that area—what was the root cause and how long did resolution take?
- How do you currently detect these failures—automated alerts, daily reconciliations, client complaints, or audit reviews?
- Where do you see the biggest visibility gaps between your front office, middle office, and the custodian?
- How long has this behavior or gap been present, and what short-term fixes have you tried that didn’t stick?
Decision & Success — who must be convinced and what counts
- If we had to build a one-line success metric for your executive team to approve a custodian change, what would it be?
- Which stakeholders will actively evaluate or veto the decision (select all that will be involved)?
- What objective, measurable targets would make this decision a clear win? (e.g., settlement success %, corporate action accuracy, MTTR)
- How will you validate those targets—internal KPIs, vendor reports, independent audits, or live pilot outcomes?
- What is your procurement and legal gating process—RFP, reference calls, SLAs & indemnities, and final board sign-off? Describe the expected steps and timing.
- Who should we plan to reference-check, and what would success look like from those references?
Scope & Coverage — the parts you cannot compromise on
- Which asset classes must be covered by any custodian you consider?
- Which markets or clearing connections are critical (e.g., DTC, NSCC, specific foreign CSDs)? List the top markets or connections we must support.
- Are there specialized modules or services you require out-of-the-box (select all that apply)?
- What asset classes or markets have caused you to patch together workarounds in the past?
- If coverage is partial in a market or asset class, what mitigations would be acceptable (e.g., sub-custodian, manual process, partner network)?
Operational Reliability — the SLAs and metrics that actually matter
- If you had to rank reliability priorities, which three would come first?
- What minimum SLA thresholds would you require to consider a vendor acceptable (provide numbers where possible)?
- How do you currently measure custodian performance—daily dashboards, monthly scorecards, or ad-hoc postmortems?
- When SLA breaches occur, what remediation or penalties have been meaningful in the past?
- Beyond raw SLAs, what softer signals of trust matter to you (e.g., transparency of incident root-cause, proactive communication, dedicated escalation path)?
Integration, Data, and Testing — practical steps to a safe cutover
- Which connectivity and data feeds are mandatory for go-live (select all that apply)?
- What formats and delivery cadence do your downstream systems require for positions and transactions?
- Describe your preferred testing approach: parallel run, sandbox pilot, phased market-by-market, or a single cutover—why?
- Who on your team will own integration tasks and post-cutover validation (names, roles, and availability windows)?
- What counterparty or market approvals do we need to secure before testing and how long do those approvals usually take?
References, Proof, and Risk Mitigation — what convinces you
- Which types of evidence would make you confident in our operational claims (pick all that would help)?
- What specific questions will you ask our references or auditors to test operational reliability?
- How important is a site visit or onshore presence when assessing operational risk?
- Would you expect a staged pilot with verifiable KPIs before full commercial commitment?
- Are there legal or regulatory provisions (e.g., data residency, custody segregation) that would be deal-breakers if unmet?
What Would Make You Move — clarifying commitment and blockers
- What is the single biggest blocker that would prevent you from switching custodians in the next 6–12 months?
- If those blockers were addressed, how soon could you realistically make a decision?
- What level of commercial flexibility or pilot terms would move the needle for your procurement team?
- What internal communications or stakeholders would need to be engaged for a successful transition (e.g., client comms, legal, board)?
- What would you like our immediate next step to be after this discovery conversation?
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RFP & Procurement Readiness
Collect RFP requirements, documentation access, and site-visit scheduling to prepare the formal evaluation.
Procurement Checklist
Tell Us Your World — quick orientation
- What's your role and who else on your team would be involved in a custody evaluation?
- How would you describe your firm?
- What is the approximate size of assets you oversee (AUM) and the number of legal entities you run?
- Who is your current custodian(s) and how long have you worked with them?
- Which of these outcomes are most important to you when evaluating a custody partner (select up to three)?
If Your Operations Had a ‘Most Frustrating Day’…
- Tell us about a recent day where custody operations caused the most stress—what happened and which client or business outcome was at risk?
- How often do events like that occur?
- When that failure happened, what was the immediate impact—trade fail, missed corporate action, wrong income posting, liquidity issue, or regulatory exposure?
- Walk me through the first 24 hours after the event—who did you call, what systems did you check, and how was the problem escalated?
- How did that event make your team feel—exhausted, embarrassed to the client, worried about compliance, or something else?
Where Things Quietly Drift Off Track
- What recurring processing problems have you started to accept as 'just how it is'—and why haven't they been fixed?
- Which routine issues consume the most time each week (e.g., stale positions, unmatched trades, corporate action clarifications, daily cash breaks)?
- How many full-time staff or FTE-hours are dedicated to exception handling and reconciliations today?
- When an exception is identified, how long does it typically take to reach a resolution?
- Which systems or manual processes feel most fragile—our reconciliation tools, our trade capture, corporate action intake, or connectivity to markets?
What You Would Never Accept
- If you had to name one non‑negotiable for a custodian, what would it be—and why would losing it be unacceptable?
- Which of these SLA-style guarantees matter most to you?
- What minimum reliability targets would convince you to switch providers (please provide numeric targets where possible)?
- How do regulatory/compliance considerations shape your 'unacceptable' list—are there particular controls or reporting chains you insist on?
- If there were contractual remedies (service credits, termination rights) tied to misses, how important would those be in your decision?
Wiring the Details: Assets, Markets, and Connectivity
- Which asset classes must a custodian support for you today and in the next 24 months?
- Which geographies and local market utilities are mission-critical (e.g., DTC/NSCC, specific CSDs, Emerging Market CSDs)?
- Do you rely on local sub-custodians or global omnibus arrangements today, and how satisfied are you with that setup?
- Are there niche instruments or markets that have caused onboarding delays or settlement exceptions in the past?
- Which connectivity or integration points would we need to prioritize (select all that apply)?
How You Measure Trust — Data, Dashboards, and Escapes
- If you had one single dashboard metric that determined whether a custodian is performing, what would it be and why?
- Which of these operational metrics do you currently track daily, weekly, or monthly?
- How do you want to be alerted about issues—real-time pushes, end-of-day summaries, or exception digests with owner assignment?
- What level of transparency do you expect into root-cause analysis—high-level notes, step-by-step incident timelines, or full audit trails?
- How important is self-service access to raw feeds and reconciliations for your internal teams vs. relying on the custodian's reports?
Stakeholders, Decisions, and the Tender Pulse
- What usually tips the decision for you—reference checks, a flawless pilot, SLA guarantees, price, or executive relationships?
- Who signs off on final selection and what are their top three concerns when approving a custody partner?
- Have you run a formal RFP in the last 36 months and what parts of that process were most painful?
- How important are site visits and operational walkthroughs versus digital evidence (dashboards, audit logs)?
- What timeline for selection and onboarding would align with internal budget cycles or asset migrations?
If We Said 'Here's a Fix' — What Would You Need to Believe It?
- What kind of demonstration or proof would move you from interest to commitment—live pilot, multi-day settlement simulation, reference walkthroughs, or third‑party attestation?
- If we proposed a pilot covering X funds and Y asset classes, what success criteria would you require to consider it successful?
- How long of a testing window do you consider sufficient to validate cutover risk—weeks, months, or a staged approach tied to business cycles?
- What internal approvals would be triggered by a pilot versus a full conversion (legal, compliance, board sign-off)?
- Which success signals from a pilot would you want to see publicly shared with your investors or stakeholders?
Next Steps You'd Welcome
- Based on this conversation, what would be the most helpful next step from us—RFP materials, a targeted pilot plan, a site visit, or reference introductions?
- What are your top three risks or objections that would slow a move to a new custody partner?
- How much runway do you need internally to evaluate and approve a new custodian?
- Who should we include in follow-up conversations and which forum do they prefer (workshop, virtual demo, written RFP response)?
- Is there anything about your firm or processes we haven't asked that would materially change how we approach a proposal for you?
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Customer Discovery
Map current custody workflows, failure modes, asset coverage needs, and measurable reliability targets.
Discovery Questions
Starting Here: A quick snapshot of your custody world
- Which best describes your organization (select one)?
- Roughly how much AUC/AUM do you need custody services for?
- Which markets and legal jurisdictions are most critical for you right now?
- How would you describe your current custody model in one sentence (who holds assets, how settlement is done)?
- Which internal teams will be most involved in custody operations and decision-making?
If settlement errors made the morning headlines, what would it say?
- How often do settlement or post-trade processing errors occur that require manual intervention?
- What are the top three failure modes you see most often (e.g., mismatched instructions, missing allocations, corporate action misses)?
- When an error occurs, how long does it typically take from detection to resolution (give examples for fast vs slow cases)?
- Tell us about a recent operational error that had material impact—what happened, who was affected, and what root cause was identified?
- Which of these best describes how you currently discover settlement exceptions?
Where does the friction hide — and how long have you been tolerating it?
- If you had to name one persistent operational frustration that leadership tolerates but resents, what is it?
- How often do operational issues translate into client escalations, and what is the typical consequence (e.g., reputational, financial, regulatory)?
- Have any past failures led to regulatory findings, penalties, or formal remediation plans? If yes, briefly describe.
- Where do you believe the root causes live most often: people, process, technology, or counterparties? Please prioritize top two.
- How does experiencing these issues make your operations team—and your clients—feel? (e.g., anxious, resigned, frequently firefighting)
Are you trading reliability for coverage?
- Which asset classes must be fully covered from day one for you to consider a custody partner?
- Which markets or instruments do you currently avoid because of settlement complexity or limited custodian support?
- How important is integrated securities lending and revenue optimization to your custody decision?
- Where have you accepted manual workarounds to gain market coverage—what are they and how sustainable are they?
- Would you prefer narrower coverage with near-zero exceptions, or broad coverage with some manual reconciliation? Why?
How do you measure trust? Let’s make reliability targets real
- What SLAs or KPIs do you already hold your custodian(s) or internal operations to (pick all that apply)?
- What are your target numeric thresholds for the most critical KPIs (e.g., % same-day settlement, exception TAT)? Please list the KPI and target.
- How do you currently receive performance reporting—frequency and channel—and who reviews it?
- How quickly do you expect high-priority exceptions to be acknowledged and remediated?
- If a partner committed to a measurable uplift (e.g., reduce exceptions by X%), how would you validate and accept that improvement?
If we could rehearse your worst day, what would that script look like?
- Which of these 'worst day' scenarios worries you most?
- When a severe operational event occurs, what is your current incident response playbook (who leads, average RTO, communication cadence)?
- How much of your recovery depends on third parties (brokers, CCPs, custodians)? Which external dependencies are most fragile?
- What are your acceptable recovery time objectives and information update cadences during an incident?
- Describe a recent incident drill or test you ran—what worked, what failed, and what would you change?
Who needs to be in the room when things go sideways?
- Which stakeholders must be included in governance for custody operations and incident escalation?
- What authority do operational teams have to make remediation decisions (e.g., instruct payment, re-route settlement) without C-suite approval?
- How frequently do you run governance reviews that include SLA performance, failed trades, and remediation status?
- Who are your critical external counterparties and which require prior approvals or special onboarding?
- What escalation contacts, channels, and SLAs would you want pre-established with a custody partner?
What would success look like — not just for ops, but for your clients?
- Imagine a future state where post-trade runs so smoothly your team breathes easier—what three outcomes change first?
- How would your clients and portfolio managers notice improved custody reliability (pick all that apply)?
- Which business metrics (besides ops KPIs) would improve with higher custody reliability (e.g., client retention, AUM growth, lower capital buffers)?
- What level of margin of error can you tolerate for corporate actions and income collection before client trust is damaged?
- Over a 12-month pilot, what stretch reliability improvement would win leadership buy-in (e.g., reduce exceptions by X%, cut TAT to Y)?
Small experiments that prove we can deliver — what would you run first?
- Which pilot scope would be most compelling to you for validating reliability (select one)?
- What datasets and access would you be comfortable sharing for a pilot (e.g., trade files, positions, corporate action calendar)?
- What duration feels reasonable for a pilot to demonstrate measurable improvement (and why)?
- How would you define pilot success and acceptance criteria (quantitative thresholds, stakeholder signoffs)?
- Who needs to sign off internally to move from pilot to production, and what procurement or legal steps typically block progression?
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Solution Experience
Translate the customer’s real trade and exception scenarios into a validated future state showing how outcomes are protected and measured.
Experience Meetings
- Current State Confirmation
- Consequence Quantification & Prioritization
- Future State Co-Design — Scenario Mapping
- Proof-of-Mechanism & Validation Demo (Customer Scenarios Only)
- Validation Plan & Acceptance Criteria Sign-off
- Customer to nominate and supply the specific trades/exceptions to be executed in the demo.
- Produce a single, agreed future-state sentence that expresses measurable outcomes.
- For each prioritized scenario, produce a validated future-state workflow with controls and explicit measurement points.
- Agree the acceptance criteria and SLAs that will demonstrate the future state is achieved.
- Host to create detailed workflow diagrams for each scenario that include decision points, control owners, and measurement hooks.
- Customer to review and annotate the workflows confirming they accurately reflect desired outcomes and responsibilities.
- Both parties to finalize the list of KPIs and the data sources that will be used to measure them.
- Set Expectations & Rules of Engagement
- Prove that the designed workflows resolve the documented failures for the prioritized scenarios.
- Demonstrate measurable improvement via KPIs/dashboards tied to the agreed acceptance criteria.
- Obtain explicit customer validation that the demonstrated outcomes match their expectations.
- Host to provision sandbox/test environment and load the agreed customer test dataset before the session.
- Introductions & Objective
- Host to deliver a short results report post-demo showing measured KPIs vs baseline for the demoed scenarios.
- Review One-Sentence Current & Future States
- Sign-off on the validation test plan and schedule for pilot execution.
- Lock measurable acceptance criteria and KPI thresholds that will determine success.
- Assign owners for test execution, monitoring, and governance decisions.
- Both parties to confirm and sign the validation test plan document and pilot timeline.
- Host to prepare test environment, monitoring dashboards, and weekly status reporting templates.
- Customer to confirm pilot participants, test data windows, and availability for governance checkpoints.
- Capture a single, unambiguous one-sentence current state describing where processing fails and who is impacted.
- Assemble documentary evidence (logs, incident reports, reconciliation extracts) for the scenarios to be used in later sessions.
- Identify primary stakeholder owners and the operational metrics currently used (TAT, exception rates, fail rates).
- Customer to deliver sample trade records, exception logs, reconciliation extracts, and two recent incident post-mortems.
- Host to draft the agreed one-sentence current state and circulate for confirmation within 48 hours.
- Assign owner to catalogue impacted roles and the concrete operational metrics referenced during the meeting.
- Produce quantified consequences (financial, time, risk) for each documented scenario.
- Agree a ranked list of priority scenarios to carry into the future-state design.
- Recap Current State Evidence
- Establish baseline metrics (error rates, exception volumes, average remediation time) to measure improvement.
- Customer to provide volumes, headcount costs, SLA definitions, and any historical fines or client penalty data for the scenarios.
- Host to run the cost/time/risk model and return a scenario impact report with prioritized recommendations.
- Schedule the co-design workshop with the prioritized scenario list attached.
- Confirm Prioritized Scenarios & Outcome Goals
- Run Scenario 1 End-to-End in Sandbox
- Define One-Sentence Future State
- Introduce Cost/Time/Risk Template
- Customer Workflow Walkthrough
- Present Validation Test Plan
- Run Scenario 2 End-to-End (Highest Consequence)
- Failure Modes & Evidence Review
- Scenario-by-Scenario Workflow Mapping
- Map Scenarios to Consequences
- Agree KPIs, SLAs & Measurement Cadence
- Quantify SLA & Reporting Impact
- Show Measurement & Reporting
- Stakeholder Impact Mapping
- Identify Controls, SLAs, & Measurement Points
- Governance & Sign-off
- Validation Check: Customer Confirmation
- Tie Back & Validate
- Prioritize Scenario List
- Next Steps & Communication Plan
- Draft & Agree One-Sentence Current State
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Solution Scope
Define covered asset classes, market connectivity, modules (settlement, corporate actions, tax, securities lending), SLAs, and integration responsibilities.
Scope Configuration
- Domestic Trade Clearing and Settlement
- Cross-Border Settlement and FX Conversion
- Securities Safekeeping and Recordkeeping
- Corporate Action Processing and Entitlements
- Income Collection and Cash Reconciliation
- Tax Reclaim and Withholding Management
- Securities Lending Program Administration
- Collateral and Margin Settlement Services
- Real-Time Position and Transaction Reporting
- Automated Reconciliation to Client Records
- Exception Management and Workflow Resolution
- Regulatory and Compliance Reporting Deliverables
- DTC/NSCC and International CSD Connectivity
Scope Questions
Domestic Trade Clearing and Settlement
- Which domestic instrument types require clearing and settlement?
- What is your average daily domestic trade count?
- What is your average daily domestic settlement value (USD)?
- Which settlement cycles do you require for domestic trades?
- Do you require auto-netting or bilateral settlement instructions for domestic flows?
- List any domestic clearing brokers, executing broker relationships, or special settlement instructions we should know (provide names or notes).
Cross-Border Settlement and FX Conversion
- Which foreign markets and currencies require settlement support?
- Do you require automatic FX conversion on settlement or client-directed FX execution?
- Are you using local market sub-custodians or expecting direct CSD access in specific markets? Please list markets requiring local agents.
- What tolerance for cross-border settlement fails and fail resolution timeframe do you expect?
- Do you need FX netting across multiple currency trades or per-transaction FX?
- Provide any market-specific settlement constraints (local holidays, local DVP requirements, special tax or regulatory restrictions).
Securities Safekeeping and Recordkeeping
- Which custody ownership model do you require?
- How many legal entities / account hierarchies need consolidated recordkeeping?
- What frequency and delivery method do you need for position and holdings statements?
- Do you require corporate registry updates, beneficiary/client-level accounting, or sub-ledger exports?
- Are there specific identifier requirements for holdings (ISIN, CUSIP, SEDOL, Local ID)?
- Describe any special safekeeping requirements (e.g., immobilization, physical certificate handling, restricted securities lists).
Corporate Action Processing and Entitlements
- Which corporate action types must be processed automatically?
- Do you require election handling and advisor/beneficiary confirmation workflows?
- What entitlement rules apply (record date vs beneficial owner, look-through to underlying investors)?
- What SLAs do you require for corporate action notification and client election response?
- Do you require proxy voting services and vote advisory / reporting?
- List markets or issuer groups with special CA handling (e.g., manual entitlements, local agent coordination).
Income Collection and Cash Reconciliation
- What types of income flows need to be collected and processed?
- What is your expected frequency for cash reconciliation?
- Do you require automated short-pay / underpayment handling and reclaims routing?
- What cash sweep or reinvestment rules should be applied (e.g., sweep to money market, auto-reinvest)?
- What tolerance thresholds and exception flags should trigger reconciliation alerts?
- Describe any special cash handling needs (multi-currency pooling, sweep across entities, treasury netting).
Tax Reclaim and Withholding Management
- Which jurisdictions require tax reclaim or withholding services?
- Do you have volume expectations for reclaim filings (monthly filings count)?
- What client documentation is available to support reduced withholding (e.g., W-8/W-9, local tax forms)?
- What success rate or SLA do you require for reclaim processing and refunds?
- Do you require tax reporting to investors and/or filing support with local tax authorities?
- Describe any complex tax scenarios (cross-border withholding relief, treaty application, pooled fund reclaims).
Securities Lending Program Administration
- Do you want an active securities lending program for eligible inventory?
- What types of collateral are acceptable for lending (cash, government bonds, equities, other)?
- Which revenue-sharing or fee structures do you prefer for lending income?
- Do you require recall / termination rules and notice periods configurable per client?
- Do you need reporting on counterparty exposure, collateral valuation, and lending utilization?
- List any regulatory or client constraints on lending (short-sale restrictions, prohibited securities).
Collateral and Margin Settlement Services
- Which collateral types and eligibility rules must the platform support?
- What margin calculation cadence and call frequency do you require (intraday, daily, weekly)?
- Do you need automated margin call notification and settlement workflows?
- Will margin or collateral be held in segregated accounts or pooled structures?
- Are there bilateral CSA/IM agreements and legal documentation that require integration into margin rules?
- Describe any special settlement instructions for collateral movements (cutoffs, delivery methods, custodial agents).
Real-Time Position and Transaction Reporting
- Do you require real-time position updates or end-of-day snapshots?
- What maximum latency SLA do you require for position/transaction feeds?
- Which delivery methods are preferred for reporting (REST API, streaming API, SFTP files, portal)?
- What data fields are mandatory in position and transaction feeds (e.g., account, legal entity, ISIN, quantity, transaction type)?
- Do you require consolidated reporting across multiple entities/currencies with currency conversion?
- Specify any integration or schema constraints (existing APIs, message formats like FIX/ISO20022, file layout).
Automated Reconciliation to Client Records
- Which client systems must reconciliations be matched against (portfolio accounting, general ledger, T+N systems)?
- What matching logic and tolerance thresholds do you require (exact match, partial match by value/quantity, percentage tolerance)?
- How often should reconciliation runs execute (real-time, intra-day batches, nightly)?
- Do you require automated posting of reconciliation exceptions into client systems or manual export only?
- What file formats and connectivity are required for importing client records (CSV, MT940, ISO20022 camt, API)?
- Describe any legacy or bespoke reconciliation rules we should map during implementation.
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Mutual Commit
Finalize commercial and legal terms, confirm SLAs, reference outcomes, and lock governance and acceptance criteria.
Agreement Modules
- Master Services Agreement (MSA)
- Statement of Work (SOW)
- Service Level Agreement (SLA)
- Pricing & Fee Schedule
- Service Schedule by Asset Class
- Implementation & Integration Addendum
- Data Processing Agreement (DPA)
- Security & Compliance Certification Acceptance
- Governance & Steering Committee Charter
- Acceptance Criteria & Test Signoff
- Reference Outcomes & Performance Warranty
- Clearing & Connectivity Agreement
- Credit, Collateral & Settlement Risk Terms
- Termination, Exit & Transition Agreement
- Authorized Signatories & Account Set-up Forms
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Deployment
Operationalize rollout with readiness checks, enablement, and outcome validation.
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Pre-Deployment Readiness
Confirm account structures, data feeds, connectivity (DTC/NSCC/CSD), counterparty approvals, and test plans are in place.
Readiness Questions
Start Here: Who and What Are We Moving Together?
- Which entity types and legal structures are in-scope for this deployment?
- Please list the legal entity names, LEIs, and any fund identifiers (tickers/ISINs) you expect to migrate or onboard
- Who will be the primary deployment lead and a secondary contact on your side (names, titles, and preferred contact methods)?
- When are you targeting go‑live for the first wave of accounts?
- Estimate your typical daily trade volume and the approximate assets under custody for the entities in this wave
If We Ship It As‑Is, What Would Break First?
- Thinking candidly: which single process or mapping do you suspect will create the most friction in week one of go‑live?
- Which prior deployment(s) experienced immediate post‑go‑live problems—what happened and what was the root cause?
- How long does it currently take your team to remediate a settlement exception from detection to resolution?
- Which clients, funds, or stakeholders would you expect to escalate to executive level if an operational failure occurred, and why?
- What financial, regulatory, or reputational thresholds trigger formal incident response on your side?
Where Are the Invisible Dependencies?
- Which external approvals or third‑party confirmations must be in place before we enable live settlement?
- Which specific market infrastructures or local agents have known onboarding timelines or blackout periods that could constrain cutover?
- Do any funds/clients require bilateral agreements, unique settlement instructions, or sponsor approvals? If so, which and why?
- Which external vendors supply your trade, position, or portfolio data (OMS/TMS/custody vendors)? Select all that apply.
- How long does it typically take those counterparties or vendors to turn around a technical or connectivity request?
Data: Can We Trust What Shows Up?
- If we sampled a trading day and ran an end‑of‑day reconciliation, where would you expect the largest differences to appear and why?
- Which data feeds will you commit to provisioning for testing (pick all that apply)?
- What are your reconciliation tolerances or acceptable variances by asset class (e.g., cash $X, positions Y shares or %)? Please be specific.
- How often do you encounter data quality issues (missing ISIN/CUSIP, stale price, broken cusip mapping)?
- Who on your team owns fixing data exceptions and what internal SLA do they operate under?
Connectivity — Are We Truly Plugged In?
- Which single connectivity path would cause a settlement deadline to be missed if it degraded during cutover?
- Select the connectivity protocols and infrastructures required for live processing
- Do you have test participant IDs, test BICs, and sandbox credentials for the markets in scope?
- Describe any historical connectivity outages or message format mismatches and how they were resolved
- Are there scheduled maintenance windows, cutover blackout periods, or batch jobs on your side that we must not overlap?
Approval, Governance, and Who Signs the Ticket
- If a high‑priority settlement fails for a flagship client, who has final decision authority to pause, rollback, or continue?
- Which stakeholders must sit on a deployment governance call (select all that apply)?
- Do you maintain formal cutover runbooks and rollback playbooks that are pre‑approved by legal/compliance?
- What evidence or artifacts will your team require to sign off on acceptance (live KPI reports, signed checklist, client confirmation)?
- What is the target timeline for governance signoff after tests complete?
How We’ll Prove It Works — Tests That Actually Matter
- Which failed test would you consider a showstopper versus something we could patch after go‑live?
- Select the test types you require pre‑go‑live
- What representative trade mixes, asset classes, and geographic legs must be included in test scripts?
- What target KPIs will you use to accept tests (examples: D+1 settlement success %, reconciliation zero‑diff %, exception resolution time)?
- Who on your side will certify and sign the test results (name, title, authority level)?
Contingency, Communication, and Post‑Go‑Live Confidence
- What single contingency (connectivity, staffing, legal, client restriction) would prevent you from proceeding at the final go/no‑go decision?
- Which fallback mechanisms must be available during cutover?
- What communication channels and cadence do you want during cutover (choose one or define below)?
- Where will we host the cutover war room (physical location or virtual room) and who has operational control there?
- Which issues will trigger an automatic post‑mortem or SLA breach investigation within 30 days of go‑live?
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Deployment Enablement
Schedule cutover tasks, assign owners, run connectivity and reconciliation tasks, and coordinate go/no‑go checkpoints.
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Validation & Settlement Tests
Execute trade lifecycle tests, corporate action simulations, reconciliation runs, and certify acceptance against SLAs.
Validation Questions
A Fast Orientation: Who You Are and What You Need
- Briefly describe your organization (AUM scale), primary legal entities, and the types of accounts or funds you need custody for.
- Which roles in your organization will actively drive or sign off the custody selection?
- What is your target decision timeline for choosing a custodian?
- Which three outcomes would make a new custody relationship feel like a clear win for your firm?
- What triggered this evaluation now (growth, incident, pricing, new markets, regulatory change, other)?
Are You Comfortable With 'Good Enough'?
- What operational problems have you quietly accepted as 'part of the job' that you'd ideally stop tolerating?
- How frequently do settlement or corporate-action exceptions occur that require manual intervention?
- When those issues occur, who feels the impact most (clients, traders, operations, finance) and how would you describe the business impact?
- Estimate the recurring operational cost or staff-hours tied to manual fixes and reconciliations per month.
- How do you currently detect exceptions—automated alerts, daily reconciliation, client reports, or ad hoc discovery?
Pinpointing the Pain: Where Does Settlement Break Down?
- Which single step in the trade lifecycle surprises you most with failure or delay—confirmation, allocation, clearing, settlement, corporate actions, or income processing—and why?
- Which asset classes or instruments create the most operational friction for you (equities, fixed income, ETFs, alternatives, derivatives, foreign securities)?
- What recurring failure modes do you see (e.g., failed settlement due to static data, mismatched corporate action entitlements, delayed income posting, FX settlement gaps)? List the top three with brief examples.
- Have cross-border or market-specific rules (local CSD cutoffs, tax reclaim processes, local agent dependencies) caused unexpected latency or losses?
- Tell us about one recent high-impact incident (what failed, downstream consequences, how it was resolved, and how long resolution took).
Who Owns the Fallout When Things Go Wrong?
- When a material settlement or corporate‑action failure occurs, who is held accountable—and has that accountability been effective?
- Describe your internal governance and escalation path for operational incidents (roles, SLA targets for acknowledgement and remediation, and communication to clients/regulators).
- Which external parties must be engaged during incidents (counterparties, brokers, local agents, exchanges, third‑party reconciliations)?
- What level of SLA response and resolution times do your stakeholders expect for critical vs. non‑critical failures?
- Have you faced regulatory reporting obligations due to operational failures? If so, how did that affect internal priorities and external remediation?
Flip It: What Would 'Rock‑Solid' Custody Look and Feel Like?
- Imagine zero unexpected settlement failures for 90 days—how would that change the daily experience of your operations, finance, and client teams?
- Which measurable KPIs would be the single best proof that custody reliability has materially improved?
- What target metrics would you set for STP rate, mean time to resolve exceptions, and reconciliation drift to consider a migration successful?
- What monitoring and alerting cadence would give you confidence—real‑time alerts, daily health reports, weekly executive summaries, or all three?
- What level of reconciliation automation and exception ownership would free up your team most—fully automated matching, automated suggestions with human review, or manual control with automation assist?
What Would Changing Custodians Really Cost — and Save?
- What keeps you awake about a transition—data mapping errors, connectivity failure, client disruption, regulatory timing, or hidden costs?
- Which integration responsibilities would you expect the custodian to own vs. your team (data feeds, mapping, client reporting configuration, reconciliation rules, remediation workflows)?
- Which connectivity and clearing channels must be in place at go‑live (select all that apply)?
- What internal testing capacity do you have for cutover (dedicated resources, shared resources, limited—require vendor support)?
- Describe non‑negotiable business continuity or disaster‑recovery requirements during migration (parallel runs, dual-processing window, rollback plan).
- How long of a cutover window is acceptable for your business—overnight, weekend, multi-day, phased over weeks?
Who Must Be Convinced — And What Proof Will Satisfy Them?
- Which single stakeholder will be the toughest to convince to change custodians and what would make them say yes?
- Which evidence matters most in your RFP/reference process (audit reports, operational run-rates, on-site visits, client references, SLA performance history)?
- How important are live reference outcomes (seeing similar clients with comparable volumes and asset classes) versus broad scale claims?
- What compliance, security, or audit documents must be provided before approval (AML/KYC controls, SOC2, business continuity plans, data residency statements)?
- Would a staged proof-of-concept or pilot (small volumes, live reconciliation, and SLA measurement) be required before contract signature?
Acceptance That Can't Be Argued With: Tests, Thresholds, and Sign‑off
- Would you accept go‑live without live trade lifecycle and reconciliation runs meeting explicit thresholds? If not, what would be absolute pass/fail criteria?
- Which test scenarios must be executed and validated pre-cutover (select all that should be included in your acceptance plan)?
- What sample volumes and duration are meaningful for you to validate stability (e.g., representative daily volume for 2 weeks, full month dry run, or X trades per day for Y days)?
- Define your reconciliation acceptance thresholds (tolerances for unmatched positions, cash variance, and exception count) that would trigger remediation rather than sign‑off.
- Who must sign final acceptance (names/roles) and what governance cadence for post‑go monitoring and adjustments will you demand?
- How long should the post‑go monitoring and hypercare period be before you consider the deployment transitioned to BAU (business as usual)?
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Success
Review live performance against reliability targets, finalize transition, and maintain a shared channel for issues and enhancements.
Success Reviews
- Live Performance & SLA Review
- Transition Closeout & Governance Handoff
- Operational Issues Triage & Root Cause Workshop
- Enhancements Prioritization & Roadmap
- Shared Channel Setup, Playbook Training & Crisis Simulation
Issues & Enhancements
- Define communication commitments to customers about roadmap and timing.
- Ensure all operational documentation and runbooks are accessible and owned by steady-state teams.
- Publish runbook repository link and assign owners for each document.
- Schedule recurring governance meetings and send calendar invites to confirmed attendees.
- Collect formal sign-offs on transition and archive acceptance artifacts.
- Incident Inventory & Impact Scoring
- Assign ownership and timelines for remediation of the highest-impact operational issues.
- Produce RCA artifacts and a verification plan to confirm fixes are effective.
- Agree new preventive controls and monitoring to reduce recurrence frequency.
- Create and publish RCA reports for each high-priority incident with recommended fixes.
- Open remediation workstreams with clear owners, milestones, and test criteria.
- Implement or tune monitoring alerts tied to the preventive controls agreed in the workshop.
- Enhancement Intake Review
- Produce a prioritized backlog of enhancements with assigned owners and target release windows.
- Agree criteria for fast-tracking urgent or regulatory-related items.
- Opening & Objectives
- Publish prioritized backlog with scoring rationale and assigned PM/owner.
- Schedule engineering/ops sprints for items planned in the next release window.
- Draft and send roadmap communication to impacted customer stakeholders.
- Shared Channel Format & Rules of Engagement
- Ensure a functional shared channel is established with clear rules and ownership.
- Validate that stakeholders understand and can execute runbooks during incidents.
- Identify and assign updates to playbooks based on the simulation learnings.
- Create the shared channel, configure tags and templates, and add initial participants.
- Update runbooks and playbooks with any gaps identified during the tabletop exercise.
- Schedule the next simulation and quarterly playbook review sessions.
- Confirm whether live performance meets contractual reliability targets and formal acceptance criteria.
- Agree a prioritized remediation plan, owners, deadlines, and verification tests for any gaps.
- Establish the next checkpoint cadence for progress reporting until remediation is complete.
- Produce and distribute the final performance report comparing live metrics to SLA thresholds within 48 hours.
- Create remediation tickets with owners, target dates, and validation steps for each SLA gap.
- Prepare acceptance certificate or conditional-acceptance amendment for signatures when criteria are met.
- Project Closeout Summary
- Complete formal handoff to account management and steady-state operations with clear role assignments.
- Establish and calendarize governance cadence and reporting obligations.
- Restate Agreed Reliability Targets and SLAs
- Value & Effort Scoring
- Prioritization Exercise
- Operational Ownership & Roles Handoff
- Playbook & Runbook Walkthrough
- Permissions, Escalation & Contact Rosters
- Live Metrics Dashboard Review
- Root Cause Analysis (RCA) for Top Issues
- Dependency & Risk Assessment
- Governance Cadence & Reporting
- Tabletop Simulation: Settlement Failure Scenario
- Escalation Matrix & SLA Breach Handling
- Roadmap Planning & Release Windows
- Define Permanent Fixes & Controls
- Top Exceptions & Incident Summaries
- Financial & Operational Consequence Assessment
- Verification & Validation Plan
- Customer Communication Plan
- Debrief & Playbook Updates
- Knowledge Transfer & Documentation
- Acceptance Decision & Conditional Criteria
- Assign Owners & Deadlines
- Formal Sign-offs and Acceptance Artifacts
- Agreed Remediation Plan & Owners
- Wrap-up & Next Checkpoint