We have partnered with Alpha Financial Software to add comprehensive trade support and automated clearance and settlement for U.S. agency mortgage-backed securities (MBS) via our thinkFolio investment management platform.

The US mortgage market represents one of the largest and most liquid segments of the fixed income universe, but it is also one of the most administratively intensive. Without expert management and efficient operational platforms, buy-side firms can often struggle with MBS to-be-announced (TBA) trade operations due to high-pressure manual processing.

To support our clients, we are integrating thinkFolio with Alpha Financial Software's TBA Mortgage Master, which delivers automated workflows and straight-through processing (STP) capabilities for US MBS. TBA Mortgage Master was designed by Alpha Financial Software to optimize middle office processes for trading agency MBS, allowing institutional investors to keep transaction costs low and mitigate operational risk while enabling them to access all relative value opportunities across the Agency MBS market. Whether actively managing long portfolios of mortgage pools hedged with TBAs or passively managing against a benchmark and exclusively using TBAs to gain mortgage exposure, TBA Mortgage Master provides the tools, workflows and reporting insights to support all MBS processing needs.

"Agency mortgage-backed securities will continue to play an important role in global fixed-income portfolios and we want to ensure our clients have all of the capabilities they need to support the asset class within thinkFolio," said Brett Schechterman, Global Head of thinkFolio at IHS Markit. "In order to enhance our functionality suite and extend further into the middle office, we chose to partner with Alpha Financial Software because of their extensive experience with the asset class and ability to deliver a comprehensive solution to drive automation and efficiency for our clients."

"From our inception, our goal has been to streamline the complexity involved in US agency MBS clearance and settlement processing," said Joe Kohanik, Managing Partner at Alpha Financial Software. "When combined with thinkFolio's decision support and trading suite, TBA Mortgage Master will deliver everything fixed income managers require on a single platform to optimize their MBS trading strategies and mitigate operational costs."

About thinkFolio

thinkFolio from IHS Markit is a leading multi-asset investment management platform that delivers sophisticated capabilities across portfolio modelling, order management and trading, cash and FX management, compliance and the investment book of record (IBOR). The platform is delivered as a managed service, supporting investment firms that want to reduce costs, maximize flexibility, enhance scale and achieve time-to-market objectives.

IHS Markit provides industry-leading data, software and technology platforms and managed services to tackle some of the most difficult challenges in financial markets. We help our customers better understand complicated markets, reduce risk, operate more efficiently and comply with financial regulation.

About Alpha Financial Software

Alpha Financial Software was founded in 2006 with the goal of providing straight-through-processing automation of U.S. Agency TBA trading to both buy-side and sell-side financial firms. Alpha Financial software provides full lifecycle MBS clearance and settlement solutions to automate front, middle and back-office. Built by veteran fixed income professionals who marry practical experience with advanced technology, Alpha Financial Software supports a broad range of financial services clients trading the MBS/OTC markets.

S&P Global provides industry-leading data, software and technology platforms and managed services to tackle some of the most difficult challenges in financial markets. We help our customers better understand complicated markets, reduce risk, operate more efficiently and comply with financial regulation.

This article was published by S&P Global Market Intelligence and not by S&P Global Ratings, which is a separately managed division of S&P Global.