Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for OPS Analyst – Mkts

🎯 Role Definition

The OPS Analyst – Mkts is a market-facing operations professional responsible for ensuring accurate and timely post-trade processing across multiple asset classes (equities, fixed income, FX, derivatives). This role manages trade lifecycle workflows, investigates and resolves trade breaks, coordinates settlements with custodians and clearing houses, maintains operational controls and SLAs, supports regulatory and internal reporting, and drives automation and process improvement initiatives in collaboration with front-office, middle-office, vendors and technology teams.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Junior Trade Support Analyst / Graduate Market Operations
Client Services Associate or Trade Capture Assistant
Internships in Middle Office, Custody, or Back Office operations

Advancement To:

Senior OPS Analyst – Markets / Lead Trade Support
Middle Office Team Lead / Manager, Market Operations
Head of Post-Trade or VP, Operations Transformation

Lateral Moves:

Risk & Controls Analyst (Operational Risk)
Business Analyst (Trading Systems / STP Projects)
Regulatory Reporting / Compliance Operations

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Monitor daily trade capture, affirmation and matching across multiple trading venues and platforms; investigate and resolve trade breaks, mismatches and failed confirmations to ensure timely settlement and minimize failed trades.
Own the end-to-end post-trade lifecycle for assigned products (equities, fixed income, FX, listed and OTC derivatives), including trade capture, enrichment, confirmations, allocations, and settlement instructions.
Manage settlement processes with custodian banks, central securities depositories (e.g., DTCC, Euroclear, Clearstream) and clearing houses; prepare and follow up settlement instructions and escalate settlement fails per SLA.
Reconcile broker, counterparty, clearing house and internal position and cash records daily; investigate material P&L, position or cash reconciliation variances and produce reconciliation exception reports.
Execute margin and collateral management activities, including margin calculation follow-up, margin call issuance, collateral movements and substitution, and reconciliation of collateral accounts.
Maintain static data and master record accuracy (counterparties, accounts, CUSIPs/ISINs, settlement instructions) to support STP and reduce operational risk; manage exceptions and data remediation.
Coordinate trade confirm/affirm workflows and client/counterparty confirmations, resolving affirmation breaks and counterpart matching issues to meet regulatory and contractual timelines.
Process corporate actions and income events across product sets, ensuring accurate entitlement calculation, election handling and settlement of corporate action activity.
Own trade fail resolution processes, identify root causes of recurring fails, implement remediation actions and work with front office and vendors to reduce fail volume over time.
Produce, analyze and present daily operational KPIs and SLAs (fails rate, settlement success, affirmation rates); identify trends and propose process improvement initiatives to business stakeholders.
Lead or support systems implementation, upgrades and changes (Murex, Calypso, internal OMS/PMS, reconciliation platforms), including requirements gathering, UAT coordination, defect triage and post-go-live support.
Prepare and submit regulatory and industry reports (EMIR, MiFIR/MiFID II, Dodd-Frank, local settlement reporting) in coordination with Compliance and Regulatory Reporting teams.
Maintain and update standard operating procedures (SOPs), job aids and knowledge-base articles; ensure team adherence to documented control processes and participate in periodic control self-assessments.
Manage intra-day and end-of-day risk controls (limits, exception monitoring), collaborate with risk teams to escalate operational incidents and support root cause analysis and remediation.
Engage with custodians, prime brokers, clearing members and third-party vendors to resolve settlement exceptions, broken trades, and connectivity or messaging issues (SWIFT/FIX/Broker APIs).
Drive process automation and STP initiatives by designing process workflows, developing Excel/VBA macros, SQL queries or Python scripts to automate manual reconciliations and reporting tasks.
Provide day-to-day support to front-office traders and portfolio managers for trade inquiries, trade amendments, cancellations and rebookings; act as a market operations subject-matter expert.
Coordinate trade allocation and settlement for complex corporate actions, reorganizations, tax reclaims and trade adjustments; ensure accurate accounting and custody entries.
Participate in incident management, change control and post-incident reviews; document incidents, timeline, impact assessment and corrective actions for audit and management reporting.
Support product launches, client onboarding and new counterparties by validating operational readiness, settlement flows and connectivity tests to ensure smooth go-live.
Conduct monthly and quarterly reconciliations with external counterparties and custodians; prepare variance analysis, explain outstanding items and drive timely resolution.
Train, coach and mentor junior operations staff; help build capabilities in trade support processes, systems navigation and control execution.
Continuously evaluate operational risk exposures and suggest pragmatic controls and automation opportunities to lower operational costs and improve STP rates.
Liaise with technology, change and infrastructure teams to troubleshoot trade capture, messaging (SWIFT/FIX), reference data and reconciliation system issues; participate in incident calls and communicate resolution progress to stakeholders.

Secondary Functions

Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Deep working knowledge of trade lifecycle and post-trade operations across equities, fixed income, FX and derivatives; familiarity with settlement cycles (T+1/T+2/T+0), CCP clearing and custody processes.
Experience with front-to-back systems and market platforms such as Murex, Calypso, Bloomberg, Reuters, Charles River, SimCorp, ION, or internal OMS/PMS.
Proficient in reconciliation tools and processes (internal and third-party reconciliation engines), and experience resolving breaks between systems, brokers and custodians.
Strong Excel skills (advanced formulas, pivot tables, Power Query) and experience building macros with VBA to automate routine tasks and reports.
SQL competence for data extraction, transformation and reconciliation across trade and position databases; ability to write complex joins and aggregation queries.
Practical knowledge of scripting languages (Python or R) for data manipulation, automation and lightweight ETL tasks is a strong plus.
Familiarity with messaging and connectivity standards (SWIFT, FIX, ISO 20022) and experience troubleshooting messaging issues.
Understanding of clearing and settlement infrastructures (DTCC, Euroclear, Clearstream, LCH) and familiarity with margin and collateral workflows.
Experience supporting UAT, system upgrades, regression testing and change control processes; able to document test cases and validate results.
Working knowledge of regulatory frameworks relevant to markets operations (EMIR, MiFID II/MiFIR, Dodd-Frank, SFTR) and trade reporting obligations.
Ability to use ticketing and collaboration tools such as JIRA, ServiceNow, Confluence and Microsoft Teams to manage incidents, tasks and documentation.
Experience with KPI tracking, SLA management and operational performance reporting; ability to create dashboards and visualizations (Power BI, Tableau) is advantageous.
Exposure to treasury/settlement accounting, P&L and cash allocation workflows for reconciliation and reporting.
Familiarity with custody, prime brokerage and custodial operational processes, including FX settlement and SWIFT messaging flows.

Soft Skills

Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with a structured approach to root cause analysis and remediation.
Excellent communication and stakeholder-management skills; able to translate technical issues into business impact and drive cross-functional resolution.
High attention to detail and quality focus in control execution and documentation.
Ability to prioritize under pressure and manage multiple time-sensitive tasks while meeting SLAs.
Proactive mindset with continuous improvement orientation; comfortable proposing and implementing process automation.
Team player with coaching ability and willingness to mentor junior staff.
Adaptability in a fast-paced markets environment and readiness to support occasional early-morning or after-hours critical incidents.
Good judgment and escalation discipline when managing operational incidents and regulatory matters.
Project-oriented mindset for system implementations, testing and process changes.
Client-focused attitude with service-oriented problem solving for front-office and external counterparties.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor's degree in Finance, Economics, Business, Mathematics, Computer Science or related discipline.

Preferred Education:

Master’s degree in Finance, Financial Engineering, Business Administration or related field, or professional certifications such as CFA, FRM, or Certificate in Operations Management.

Relevant Fields of Study:

Finance
Economics
Business Administration
Mathematics / Statistics
Computer Science / Engineering
Accounting

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

2–5 years in market operations, trade support, middle-office or post-trade processing roles.

Preferred:

3–7 years experience with live market operations exposure across multiple asset classes; demonstrable experience using Murex, Calypso, Bloomberg, DTCC or custody platforms, plus hands-on SQL/VBA or Python automation experience.
Prior exposure to regulatory reporting and reconciliation best practices, and a track record of improving STP rates and reducing operational risk.