For years the industry has struggled with straight-through-processing of U.S. Agency MBS TBA trades between buyer and seller. Error-prone manual processing persists, and the late reporting of trade assignments to dealers remains a constant moving target — creating unnecessary financial market risk.
The cause shows up in the clearance data flows: the work capacity and the raw number of counterparties on each side of the market are badly mismatched.
Instructing offsets once a month under current SIFMA guidelines, rather than daily.
Absorbing a cumulative 30 days of TBA offsets in the two days before settlement — a lop-sided, high-risk window where favors or fails become the monthly routine.
The MBS Ops Network solves the long-standing issue of manual processing by automating buy-side to sell-side clearance data flows, adhering to current SIFMA guidelines, and adapting to future industry-wide central clearing initiatives.
Member firms access the network using either TBA Mortgage Master (via Azure) or The MBS Ops Manager, a web-based application for managing all trade-for-trade TBA clearance workflows.
A buyer or dealer who agrees to disclose and make available all of their TBA trades and trade contras for processing and communication on the network.
A buyer or dealer who, as a trading contra, agrees to see, process, and communicate on the network with sponsors.
Sponsors can provide clients or other third parties read-only network access to specific accounts.
Always performed. No cut-off.
Optional, with a 72-hour day cut-off.
Optional, with a 48-hour day cut-off.
DTCC EPN communication on the 48-hour day.
Every confirmed trade flows through one multi-tenant database — matched, offset, allocated, and reported across the venues and utilities your desk already uses.
No chasing, no manual emails. Every clearance event on the network produces its own notification and its own audit trail.
Project 50 seeks to grow AFS's annual processing volumes tenfold on top of a proven transaction-based business model — building the utility for every trading participant in the U.S. Agency MBS market.
Current market thinking puts mandated central clearing of U.S. Agency MBS three to five years out, following the U.S. Treasury mandate. It follows that the second-largest global bond market will track the largest — and AFS is building for that structure now.
Walk through how The MBS Ops Network automates clearance data flows across your counterparties.
