Specialist - Investment Compliance Support Services at Apex Group

Summary of the position:

• The Specialist: Investment Compliance Support Services is first and foremost the regulatory specialist in the Investment Compliance Support Services (“ICSS”) team.
• The ICSS team reports both regulatory and bespoke mandate compliance breaches to clients daily on a post-trade basis and provides the functionality to our clients for monitoring breaches on a pre-trade basis as well, from NX Manager.
• The team also produce monthly regulatory holdings reports to clients, run from the data warehouse, and enriched with data from both
• InvestOne and NXManager.
• External Manager look-through is performed for monthly reporting.The role requires good knowledge/experience across the investment and operational cycle.
• The role largely entails the interpretation of both mandates and legislation/regulation to effectively translate the regulation into workable compliance rule results, upon which our clients depend for guiding their investment decisions within client mandates and prescribed regulation.
• The role will collaborate within the ICSS team and other relevant teams to ensure that the interpretation is successfully applied to both the NX Manager platform (enabling pre- and post-trade compliance) as well as the Compliance Reporting Warehouse.
• Whilst the primary focus of the role is thus the interpretation of mandates / regulation / legislation, there is also a requirement to have a working knowledge and understanding of the process of converting this interpretation into rules within the technology platform.
• Therefore, strong technical or operational knowledge of investment instruments and issuers is required, as experience on NX Manager (Decalog) (preferred) or another comparable compliance monitoring system is ideal.In support of the above, the basis of successful compliance rule monitoring and reporting is the continual oversight on static and market data to ensure correct classification into regulatory rulesets.
• You will be required to assist with the processing of external manager data and mapping instruments for ingesting into the Apex systems and thus will work closely with the Instrument and Fund Setup team to update and maintain static data integrity for investment compliance purposes.
• Data and issuer market capitalization checks will be required.

Outline of main duties and responsibilities :

• Reporting: Rotation of daily post-trade reporting; monthly compliance reporting (Reg28 and Reg30).
• Monthly pre-reporting checks to ensure sound and consistent instrument and issuer classifications for monthly reporting.
• Troubleshooting classification issues, cleaning static data to support daily monitoring and monthly report integrity.
• Support the efforts within the ICSS team in respect of interpreting and documenting legislative, regulatory and mandate compliance requirements applicable for use in NX
• Manager and the Compliance Reporting Warehouse.
• Documenting the interpretation of legislative or regulatory changes, in a manner which allows for these documents to be circulated internally at Apex or externally to clients, and input into planning for these changes.
• Testing of all changes and developments.
• Developing, coding, and implementing compliance rules to NX Manager.
• Critically reviewing compliance rules to improve integrity on an ongoing basis.
• Following of proper test protocol in UAT environment and change control protocol of rules into the production environment.
• Being pro-active in solution-finding and regularly question processes and “status quo’s” to constantly improve.
• Providing professional support to the Apex client base in respect of compliance related queries, including interpretation, breaches, reporting, etc.
• Build excellent rapport with clients in developing their confidence in our service offering, by ensuring your full understanding of their requirements, and maintaining such well managed relationships to achieve the best results for the clients.
• Supporting the business development effort in expanding the Compliance Support Services function, thinking with a business brain.
• Actively strive to live by and operate within the Apex core values.
• Actively drive and contribute to a culture of quality/excellence, through risk awareness and adherence to compliance standards and all relevant operational controls and processes.

Required Skills and Experience

The successful candidate will possess:

• An accounting or business degree (minimum B. Com or equivalent) together with at least 4-5 years fund administration/management experience in a compliance related role.
• Certificate in Compliance Management.
• Strong numerical and analytical skills to review fund compliance reports in detail and respond to queries.
• The role requires excellent Excel skills to analyze portfolio exposures and structures, and to enable manual calculation of desired compliance rule outputs.
• Agile and flexible thinking (“thinking on your feet”), creative thinking for solving problems.
• Strong knowledge of the full investment process starting from the portfolio manager’s investment decision through operational process to client reporting.
• Strong knowledge and understanding of the regulatory investment limits dominant in the
• Republic of South Africa such as Regulation 28, CISCA, Regulation 30, and short-and long-term insurance investment limits and how various instruments apply to these regulations.
• Attention to detail and structured work approach.
• Excellent communication and negotiation skills, both written and verbal, as the ICSS team is dependent on downstream operations. The rule requires confident interaction with all areas of the business to perform team tasks.
• Confident, self-motivated individual and able to work under pressure.
• Positive attitude.

Other requirements

• The role will require commitment to completion of tasks for clients that are set by deadlines.
• This will from time to time require longer hours.