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Back office in the bank. What is a back office and why does your company need it? The back office includes the following departments:

What is a back office: origin and explanation of the term + 3 reasons why your company needs it + examples of back office tasks in 3 areas of business + 2 types of back-office computer programs + 3 problems that they solve.

Many foreign words in the Russian language have become the definition of some field of activity. In the early 2000s, the concept of a back office appeared in the business industry.

Over the years, the term began to be used in sales, in financial institutions, as well as in the securities market.

What is a back office and what role does it play in modern business?, you will learn from this article.

1. Explanation of the term “back office”

This expression came into Russian from English – “back-office” (which can be literally translated as “back-office”). Today, its meaning is a little vague, due to the fact that back office divisions have many areas of activity that are radically different from each other.

A back office is a department in a company whose task is to process, register, and record transactions related to the company’s finances.

Along with this, there is another, no less important department, which is called the front office. What is this? The task of the front office is to conclude deals and attract new partners and clients who influence the financial position and development of the company.

The back office includes the following departments:

  • accounting,
  • Human Resources Department,
  • company administration,
  • support service, analysts,
  • statistics, etc.

Essentially, he deals with all administrative matters.

The front office, in turn, is a staff of managers who, for their part, attract new partners to the company.

2. How did such a thing as a back office appear?

The history of the creation of such a popular term in business dates back to ordinary construction planning.

All buildings of large companies were built according to the same plan...

The front office came first- front side of the building. It was needed so that a client or visitor could easily find the desired department or specific employee. This premises had an expensive renovation, because it is the “face” of the company. Employees must always be well dressed, behave politely with customers, etc.

The second part of the building was called the back office. All production and administrative work took place on this territory. Since visitors had never been here, the renovation, lighting, and interior were not presentable.

If in the front office employees paid great attention to appearance, then in the back office the main role was played by the professional qualities of the company’s personnel.

Building layout separation has become a global term for the two divisions of any company. The front office is a bright picture that attracts customers. The back office is the company’s development department, which monitors all processes.

3. Why does your company need a back office?

Directors of start-up companies are faced with the question of whether they need such a division at all.

Its creation in a new company or even in an existing one is important for 3 main reasons:

    Company reputation.

    Today, there is great competition in any field of activity. Back-office employees maintain the company's reputation every day through their actions.

    For example, specialists in the analytics and statistics department make their calculations every day in order to improve the organization’s performance.

    The administrative department of the company constantly ensures that everyone does their work efficiently and as quickly as possible.

    Increased profits.

    Of course, front office employees attract new clients, but without accounting support, any transactions with money can increase income or, conversely, reduce it.

    Moreover, it is in the back-office department that employees develop new development plans, which in the future can increase profits significantly.

    Responsibility for risks in new transactions.

    The work of front office managers is based on finding a large customer. At the same time, without calculations of all the benefits and possible risks from the transaction by back office workers, the contract will not be concluded.

    This stage is the most critical, because it determines whether the company will make a profit or a loss.

4. Back office tasks in 3 different areas of activity

Although the interpretation of the term is the same for any business sector, in practice, in different fields of activity, workers perform tasks that differ.

3 examples of what exactly the back office is responsible for in different areas:

    In a financial institution, this unit is the operational and accounting department, which is responsible for the work of the entire organization. Specialists pay great attention to credit operations.

    Also on their shoulders lies the responsibility for making transactions related to securities, the work of the accounting department, and control over the assets and liabilities of the bank.

    Trade and sales.

    In the field of trade and sales, the division is responsible for and controls all financial transactions, receipt of goods, their sales, sales, movement, write-off of balances, return of defects, assessment and study of the trade market, acquisition of equipment, premises for selling the product, etc.

    For food service workers, all department work is related to day-to-day operations. The back-office takes responsibility for drawing up financial reports, keeping records of products, monitoring the quality and preparation of dishes for clients, and recruiting personnel.

5. Responsibilities of a back office employee

There are many specialists in this department and each of them has their own task. It is possible that newbie firms have few employees, sometimes there may be only 5-10. Therefore, we have to look for a universal worker, a specialist who can be responsible for several processes at once.

If you are in exactly this situation, then you must understand what duties a person from the back-office department will be required to perform.

The main responsibilities of a specialist in this department include:

  1. Execution and registration of the transaction.
  2. Conclusion of contracts related to the purchase or sale of goods.
  3. Transactions involving the transfer of ownership from the seller to the buyer.
  4. Control over the company's financial flows.

Almost all responsibility for the prosperity of the company lies on the shoulders of the back office workers. The slightest mistakes in miscalculations in financial transactions and organizational issues can lead to losses or even losses.

6. Is it possible to replace the back office department with a program?

Whatever one may say, it’s the 21st century – a time when most processes are automated (or at least tending towards it). This fate did not spare the back office subsection.

Back-office is a computer program that controls and executes the company’s technological processes related to sales, finance, accounting, etc.

Many directors purchase these programs in order to save money on the salaries of administrative department employees.

There are 2 types of back-office for PC:

Here, for example, is the “Compact” program, which is intended for a store. The database contains all the information about the operation of the trading network. To use it, 2-3 people are enough to monitor the work and enter new data.

This way, you can resolve the following issues much faster:

    Fast customer service and conclusion of new transactions.

    The program automatically makes calculations, determines possible risks, profits, losses, etc. In this case, there can be no errors a priori if all the data is entered into the program correctly.

    Automatic accounting and control of the company.

    When a company receives data on its financial condition and statistics on the performance of all departments in a matter of seconds, this contributes to maximum control over the company’s activities from within.

    This information is needed so that management can monitor all processes, study shortcomings and eliminate them in a timely manner.

    Analysis of cooperation with clients and partners.

    Monitoring this information will help improve the company's marketing strategy.

From this article you learned what is a back office, as well as about the existence of computer programs that can replace an entire department with live employees. The program speeds up many organizational processes.

An overview of working with such an important element as

the company's back office - in the following video:

This is, of course, a big plus for the work of the company, but then there will be no need for some specialists and people will have to be deprived of work. In addition, with all their precision, machines are not yet able to outperform humans in many respects.

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06Jun

What is Back Office

Back office is a term that refers to that part of business operations that are aimed at solving problems necessary for the normal functioning of the company. This definition comes from the tradition of placing technical and other non-public departments at the rear of a business facility.

What is a back office, in simple words.

In simple words, the back office is the company’s employees who do not interact with the public. They provide all the technical activities of the company, which are usually hidden from view. Examples include departments such as accounting, IT department, warehouse workers, and so on.

Main components of business.

Traditionally, almost any business consists of several areas that form a holistic and operational structure of the company. Each of the areas strictly performs its tasks to ensure the work of other departments.

Company architecture:

  • Front office;
  • Middle office;
  • Back office.

Now let's look at each sector in more detail.

Front office- This is the area of ​​the company that is responsible for direct interaction between customers and sellers. This can include: salespeople, sales managers, consultants, investment brokers, traders, and so on. In general, this category includes those employees who directly bring income to the company, who, so to speak, make real money. In addition to specific specialties, the front office is usually called the showcase of a commercial website, in particular an online store.

Middle office- This is the field of activity in which administrative and managerial personnel work. This may include analytical departments, financial management departments, marketing specialists, and so on.

Back office is an area that does not directly generate revenue for the business, but rather provides vital support and administration. These include: human resources department, accounting, logistics, technical personnel, postal and warehouse departments, IT department. By analogy with the front office, the internal administrative part of the site, to which ordinary users do not have access, is usually called the back office. Sometimes there are options for using the term back office as a definition of a personal account in a particular Internet project.

What is the difference between front office and back office?

Having read the above short definitions of these areas of employment, we can conclude that the main difference lies in public interaction with clients. It should be noted that there is no significant difference in salaries between these niches. In this matter, a specific profession and the responsibilities assigned to a person play a significant role.

Training for interaction between departments within the bank
annotation

Where does a bank start? Of course, from the front office. Banks need the client to say to himself: this is my bank, I like the service it provides and I like the way its front office is organized. The client does not see what happens next. Nevertheless, Strange as it may seem, the quality of sales and customer service depends on the coordinated interaction of two more “offices”, the middle and back offices, with each other and with the front office. This happens because they should be internal clients and partners in relation to each other and participate together in a single chain of creating consumer value for the client, and not oppose each other, as is often the case. A bank cannot and should not have client-oriented and non-client-oriented divisions, just because individual divisions do not work directly with clients.

When preparing a training seminar examples from foreign and domestic banking practice were used, and Basel II recommendations, which determine the separation of risk management functions into a separate structure and application of uniform approaches to risk management in the bank, which leads at a certain stage to the need to create a middle office.

Participants

This training is intended for all senior and mid-level bank managers to help them master and understand the effective principles of organizational building of a credit organization and internal interaction.

Training program

1. Concepts and definitions

  • Bank structure and its elements:
    - Strategy, strategic goals and objectives;
    - Business architecture;
    - System architecture.
  • Elements of the bank's business architecture:
    - Front-Office;
    - Middle office;
    - Back-office;
    - Accounting.
  • System architecture elements:
    - Information warehouse (DWH);
    - Reporting.
  • Product approach to defining service functions.

2. The division of banking structures in global and domestic practice into front-middle and back offices from the point of view of the evolution of organizational structures of risk management

  • Elimination of conflicts of interest is the fundamental principle of distribution of functions in the bank.
  • Formal risk management units.
  • Distributed risk management structure.
  • Transitional risk management structures.
  • Centralized risk management structure:
  • -Front office;
  • -Middle office;
  • -Back office.

3. Front office

  • Front office concept.
  • Main functions.
  • Interaction between the front office and bank departments.
  • What the front office shouldn't do.
  • The front office is a factor in the bank's capitalization.

4. Middle office

  • The concept of the middle office: “between a rock and a hard place.”
  • Middle office as an important element of the risk management system in the bank.
  • Organizational structure of the middle office.
  • Middle office functions.
  • Interaction between the middle office and bank departments.
  • Comparative characteristics of middle and back office functions.
  • Optimizing interaction between bank departments using a middle office.
  • Which banks need a middle office? Criteria for creating a middle office.
  • The relationship between the quality of customer service and the availability of a middle office.
  • Non-core functions of the middle office or what the middle office should not do.

5. Back office

  • The role and functions of the back office in a bank.
  • The place of the back office in the organizational structure of the bank.
  • Interaction between the back office and bank departments.
  • Practical aspects of organizing the work of the back office.
  • Legal support for back office activities.
  • Methodology for organizing back office work.
  • What not to do in the back office.

6. Relationship between strategy, business processes and organizational structure

  • The functional principle of bank management is the basis for the isolation and disunity of divisions.
  • The process approach to bank management is to ensure the growth of the bank’s value by attracting and retaining effective clients.
  • Structure of the bank's business processes.
  • Process as an object of control.
  • An example of a business process “Consideration of an application and issuance of a loan.”
  • Business process modeling standards.
  • Types of banking organizational structures: advantages and disadvantages.
  • Relationship between organizational structure and business processes.
  • Engineering and reengineering of bank business processes.

7. Management workshops and exercises

  • Determination of the divisions included in the front-middle- and back-office and the order of their interaction.
  • Does a bank need a middle office?
  • Definition of main and auxiliary business processes.
Methods
  • Interactive seminar.
  • Work in groups to prepare and defend presentations.
Duration

In order to eliminate the information gap between the front and back offices, middle offices appeared in world banks in the 90s of the last century. In Russia, only a few have had such an organizational structure to date.

Two or three years ago, a simplified structure prevailed in most large Russian banks: front and back offices. But recently, the mysterious phrase “middle office” has become increasingly heard. Mysterious because a simple translation of the name does not always provide a complete understanding of the tasks of this unit. Today, middle offices in the world's leading banks are departments that must independently assess the bank's portfolios, monitor compliance with various limits and prepare daily reports for risk managers.

In Russia, until recently, the functions of the middle office were “spread out” between front and back office employees. “Our “middles” in banks began to appear with the transition from formal risk management structures created to meet the requirements of supervisory authorities to centralized structures that manage risks in accordance with international standards,” says Semyon Alperin, deputy head of the department of limits and positions of Prom-Svyazbank.

The frequent discrepancy between the duties performed and the standard “back office” and “front office” ones gave rise to numerous conflicts on the topic: “I should trade, and not enter “tickets” into the system” or “the back office “processes” ready-made transactions, but doesn’t bring them into his own system.” Disagreements of this kind gave rise to the logical and inevitable emergence of a new division - the middle office.

Today, in Russian banks, the middle office most often performs two functions: control of commercial lending operations and control of operations in financial markets. The “middle” differs from the back office in the generalization of data and a larger vision of the picture of the structure of the bank’s liabilities and assets.

The increase in turnover in financial markets and the experience gained by bankers as a result of the first serious banking crises, especially as a result of the events of 1998, played a role in the organization of middle offices in some Russian banks. The losses and bankruptcies of a number of banks made us think about risk management and the introduction of a unit such as risk management into the organizational structure, to which previously the attitude was rather cool. In many banks there were no risk analysts at all. With the advent of divisions in banks responsible for analysis and forecasting, the need arose to control the restrictions established by risk management on the magnitude of credit and market risks.

“In a number of banks, it was decided to separate control functions into a separate structure, since risk management (RM) is still an analytical department,” Igor Shiyanov, head of the department for monitoring limits and positions at Alfa-Bank, tells BO. - As a result, a middle office emerged, responsible for monitoring the execution of risk management orders by traders, as well as for the generation of position reporting. We can say that RM carries out risk management through the middle office. Considering that the middle office should ideally control limits in all markets in which it is present, this division began to operationally accumulate a summary of all positions of the bank, as well as the current financial result, which ultimately became useful not only for risk -management, but also for the bank’s top managers.”

The name of the division - middle office - fully reflects its essence: this is no longer a front office, but not yet a back office or accounting department. It's right in the middle, as the name suggests. For example, a trader (front office) concludes a deal to purchase securities, the middle office must enter it into the system, the back office must pay, and the accounting department must prepare financial statements. Or another option: the front office has agreed to issue a loan to the client, the back office transfers the money, and the basis for the transfer - the agreement and all accompanying documents - is prepared by the middle office.

MIDDLE OFFICE IN ALFA BANK The middle office of Renaissance Investment Management Bank consists of 14 people, which is quite a lot on average in the market. This is explained by the wide range of functions and tasks performed by this unit.

Three people in the middle office - a group for entering and processing transactions. They are responsible for the correctness of transactions in the system and interact with traders, back office, client managers, risk managers for the correctness and timeliness of data reflection.

Two employees are engaged in the establishment and preparation of documents for “structured” and non-standard transactions.

Nine specialists are client managers. They provide analytical reports to clients, make comments on the reports: on the composition of the portfolio, on the method of calculating remuneration, on the method of calculating profitability, etc. Also, the tasks of client managers include consultations on standard products, participation in the development and execution of documents to support individual and structured transactions. They carry out the client’s instructions and monitor client orders, interact within the middle office, with the back office, lawyers, risk managers, accounting and clients

“Most advanced banks and companies have created their middle offices based on Western experience,” says Irina Fedorova, head of the operations department at Renaissance Investment Management. - In both cases, this is a division that performs an auxiliary function in processing transactions. In “structural” transactions, the middle office takes part in its development, correct execution and subsequent control, and if standard transactions are carried out, the middle office writes “tickets”, enters transactions into the system and controls subsequent execution.”

There are also other approaches to the functionality of the middle office in the not yet fully formed Russian practice. Since this division is rare in the structure of banks, its definition remains vague. In addition to direct supervisory functions, the “middle” is often entrusted with a variety of non-core tasks: from sales functions to a unit responsible for or developing a regulatory framework.

Or maybe we shouldn’t single it out?

World practice, overlapping with Russian reality, often raises questions and doubts. So, regarding middle offices, a significant part of the banking community is thinking: is it worth separating this component into a completely separate structure?

The need for this distinction can be substantiated using the specific example of an investment bank: the front office concludes transactions, its specialists work with such concepts as “position”, “security”, “current financial result”. The back office works with the concepts of “transaction”, “confirmation”, “registration”, “”. At the same time, the front office, that is, traders, is of little interest in limits. If they calculate any risks, they do it only for themselves, they consider their potential. Traders do not coordinate transactions with each other in any way, and if individually each trader’s portfolio can be quite diversified, then when the bank’s portfolio is considered as a whole, it may turn out that together the traders bought a bunch of Gazprom shares.

It is the middle office that should add up these portfolios and look at the concentration of certain stocks or bonds and calculate the limits for the whole. Moreover, this must be done in the current mode. The same back office is not interested in why they were purchased at a certain quote; it is only involved in processing transactions. So it turns out that between the trader, who thinks about his own benefit, and the back office, who only thinks about registration, there must be a middle office that will coordinate their activities.

The middle office is necessary as an organizational component, an independent structure that has nothing to do with the business and is not interested in the financial result. This is a dedicated, separate “cool head” that carries out current internal control.

At the same time, independent does not mean cut off from others. Quite the contrary, it is the middle office that is the connecting link; its important function is to optimize interaction between the bank’s divisions and communicate with all divisions. This is especially important when conducting complex “structured” transactions. The functions of current monitoring and control are delegated to the middle office; to some extent, it turns out that the middle office is forced to streamline the bank’s activities.

The presence of a large staff of bank employees sometimes leads to difficulties for traders; they do not know which employee of the back office, depository, or accounting department to contact if they have questions. Therefore, to save time, traders prefer to resolve any questions regarding their operations by contacting a middle office employee. There is also a connection in the opposite direction. This imposes certain obligations on the qualifications of “middle” employees, who must solve diverse problems.

EXAMPLE OF A MIDDLE OFFICE ORGANIZATION The middle office in Alfa-Bank is a division that, in the process of development, in addition to the main function of limit control, took upon itself the implementation of a number of operations inherent in the reporting, treasury, and other departments. The department is functionally divided into three parts: control of investment operations, control of credit operations and control of settlements. The functions of the middle office include control not only of internal limits, but also control of a number of restrictions established by external regulators: the Central Bank of the Russian Federation, the Federal Financial Markets Service.

The second aspect of the activity is the formation of multi-level reporting both for risk management and for other divisions of the bank. The information prepared by the middle office is also used when making decisions by the bank’s collegial bodies and department heads.

A fairly large part of the time is spent maintaining the bank’s information systems: setting up new instruments and counterparties, downloading quotes, updating limits. Middle office employees also monitor the presence of short positions and, for a number of instruments, close them themselves. Alfa-Bank's middle office employs 20 people, and the workload on each employee is quite heavy.

Only large banks need a middle office

Not all banks have the need to organize a middle office. In Russian practice, the middle office is mainly found in banks with foreign capital, where management is carried out by Western managers, or in banks that widely use Western experience. Almost always, a middle office is present in the structure of investment companies. In small banks, this function is distributed between the front and back offices, but medium-sized and especially large ones are absolutely necessary.

“More often than others, such structures are created by investment and universal banks,” notes Igor Shiyanov (Alfa-Bank). - Having a middle office in a bank that operates mainly in the lending segment is exotic. I think that in Russia the number of banks that have middle-office divisions in their structure does not exceed 5%.”

If we talk about the scale of business, then a middle office is needed mainly only by large banks, banks with a strong investment component or banks with large turnover in financial markets. In this case, assigning employees responsible for limit control to a separate department is advisable. In addition, only a large bank can afford the operating costs of maintaining additional staff and purchasing special software. A middle office usually appears at the stage of growth or expansion of a company's business. And if the bank is not indifferent to the quality of customer service and wants to avoid confusion in the work of the front and back offices, then the middle office becomes a necessary link. Some experts believe that a middle office is a must have for the top twenty Russian banks, but in other cases this structure cannot be called widespread or necessary. For a small bank that conducts two transactions per week with bills, four with shares and five with bonds and issues several loans, an employee of another specialty can process a small amount of data: back office or risk management. They can fully cope with all the tasks, and there will still be time to complete transactions.

Every banker wants to know where the middle office sits

“If you have a good IT system, the location of the middle office does not matter at all, since this allows for full communication between the front and back office,” says Semyon Alperin (Promsvyazbank). - But in practice, most often the middle office is located next to the back office. Organizationally, the middle office is part of the operations department or risk management department. At Promsvyazbank, it is included in the “Finance and Risks” block, that is, it relates to risk management.”

So far, there has not been a clear approach to the question of which division the middle office belongs to; it all depends on the primary nature of its activities. If the middle office does not physically “sit” on the territory of the front office, then clients, as a rule, should not visit it. Sometimes middle employees communicate directly with clients, but this is the exception rather than the rule. Despite the fact that the “middle” functionality does not provide for direct communication with people, this does not exclude interaction with counterparties using a variety of communication means.

But if a middle office practically does not need a separate room, then its technologies and equipment are very specific and independent. Due to the specifics of their work, middle office employees must have the highest level of access to the bank’s information systems, allowing them to obtain any information about transactions subject to control, the base of counterparties, quotes, etc. In the normal organization of the technological process, control is carried out automatically, and a middle office employee intervenes in the process of authorizing transactions in exceptional cases.

Therefore, the middle office needs specialized software that allows it to cover all the markets in which the bank operates. This is due to the fact that often front and back office systems do not allow receiving all the necessary information in sufficient volume and in the required format. At the same time, the system in the architecture should occupy an intermediate position between the front and back office software and not allow transactions that have not passed limit control to enter the back office for further processing.

An interesting point of view is that of some experts who believe that the very name “middle office” could have appeared precisely from the developers of IT solutions for risk management. It was they who could divide the solutions into three levels: technologies for conducting transactions were classified as solutions for the front office, for the middle office - for controlling limits and risks, and for the back office - for processing transactions. According to the hypothesis, such a division was natural and therefore easily took root.

Caesars of the banking world

In their work, middle office employees are always somewhere in the middle, at the intersection of some kind of “conflict of interest” between the front and back offices. “The tasks that middle employees have to solve are to find a compromise and an acceptable solution for the front, back and client at the same time,” reveals the specifics of the work Irina Fedorova (Renaissance Investment Management). - At the same time, the interests of the company and the law are respected. So if a front office employee knows how to trade in the RTS system, and a back office employee can be a narrow specialist in a specific area, for example, he knows how to transfer securities to depositories, then a “middle” employee should be more versatile. He needs to know, at least in general terms, the entire cycle of a particular operation, from the moment of its conclusion to the calculation of taxes on the profit received. Otherwise, he will not be able to effectively coordinate the process.”

In addition, to perform control functions, a middle office employee must have a sufficiently detailed understanding of the features of the front office in order to speak the same language as traders. Of course, he must understand the algorithms for calculating positions, which are defined differently in different types of transactions. At the same time, the specialist must understand, at least to a minimum extent, the specifics of the work of the back office and depository, since questions regarding transactions may also arise from representatives of these divisions of the bank. If the bank does not have a perfect IT system that allows the generation of both detailed and consolidated reports, the employee is subject to additional requirements for working with large amounts of data. Often former analysts and traders work in middle offices.

“For a middle office employee, personal qualities are also important: endurance, concentration, communication,” continues the list of requirements Alexey Kuzmin, head of the middle office of FINAM Investment Company. - During the day you have to communicate quite a lot with clients, and in a fairly intense mode. For example, if we are talking about forced closure of a position when there are not enough funds in the brokerage account.”

Since middle office employees work with a variety of automatic information systems, they must know not only banking products, but also understand programming, know the SQL language, and be able to work with databases.

Given a certain organization, the middle office requires not only universal, all-knowing employees, but also simple “hard workers.” For example, in one of the Russian middle offices there are employees performing the functions of trader assistant. Traders give them information about the transactions they carry out in external systems, and assistants enter transactions with all parameters into the bank’s accounting system, where, in turn, limits are monitored. This is a fairly mechanical job, but it can also apply to the middle office.

Sergey Rybin,
Deputy Chairman of the Board of Stroykredit Bank:

Middle office supports non-standard services

As the product line expands, more and more credit institutions are creating full-fledged middle offices. The need for them is experienced primarily by banks that actively offer services that are not fully standardized. Promotion of such products involves active interaction with the client to accurately determine his needs and analyze his creditworthiness. In some cases, it becomes necessary to provide additional documents and reporting. Middle office employees must successfully solve such problems. They are often also responsible for risk analysis. At Stroykredit Bank, the main activities of the middle office are active work with clients attracted by the front office, transaction support and risk analysis.

Maxim Markov,
Head of Financial Institutions Department at Globex Bank:

The middle office is the treasury accounting department

In essence, the middle office is the treasury accounting department. As you know, one of the main tasks of the treasury in any bank is to maintain the liquidity and solvency of the bank, including through various operations in different sectors of the financial market. In this regard, one of the main tasks of the middle office is to maintain the bank’s payment position in different time perspectives, based on information from the bank’s divisions: client, credit, settlement and others, including from the treasury itself. Based on this information, the middle office draws up a payment plan for the bank. With its help, the bank's treasury manages its liquidity: either places excess liquidity on financial markets, or, conversely, reinforces the bank's liquidity through the use of various financial instruments. In addition, the middle office records and controls the operations of the treasury itself in order to comply with the limit of open currency positions and manage risks on open positions.

Valery Naumov,
Deputy Chairman of the Board of Soyuz Bank:

Middle office is full support of transactions

In the recent past, there was no clear definition of the functions of the middle office. And its role was played by departments or lending support departments. With a small volume of transactions, such a “middle” model is possible even now, when one division processes, issues and services the loan. But in the context of business development, banks strive to separate the functions of “front”, “middle” and “back”. In our bank, the middle office is a department responsible for retail credit transactions in terms of risk control at the stage of issuing a loan and further support of the transaction until full repayment. “Middle” provides feedback on transactions in the bank and, in essence, is a tool for increasing the bank’s manageability. Middle employees, in addition to their functions, must know the basics of legal aspects and accounting of credit transactions.

Alexey Kuzmin,
Head of the middle office of IC "FINAM":

Middle office in an investment company

Traditionally, the functional purpose of the middle office of an investment company is to carry out brokerage and dealer operations on the exchange and over-the-counter securities markets. Traders of the FINAM company work on all Russian exchange platforms: RTS, MICEX, MSE, St. Petersburg exchange. The middle office accepts and submits client orders for the purchase and sale of securities, monitors clients' positions, including monitoring the margin level at the time of closing the trading session and the amount of the client's debt to the broker. Middle office employees monitor risks arising during transactions and provide information interaction with all clients in whose interests transactions are made. The middle office has created a risk management system that allows you to make money on any movements of the stock market, including during its fall.

Back-office English back-office

a division of a bank or brokerage company that performs operations on execution, accounting and registration of transactions with securities, settlements with clients; in contrast to the front office, where transactions are directly concluded.

Dictionary of business terms. Akademik.ru. 2001.

See what “Back Office” is in other dictionaries:

    An operational accounting unit that ensures the work of units involved in managing the assets and liabilities of an organization operating in financial markets. The task of the back office is documentary and electronic processing... Wikipedia

    back office- The part of the company responsible for activities related to completed transactions. Depending on the organizational structure of the company, the back office can be one department or consist of many structural divisions (such as: related to... ... Technical Translator's Guide

    back office- back office, back office... Together. Apart. Hyphenated.

    "BACK OFFICE"- 1. banking division, a department of a company that performs various documentary operations in the operating rooms for servicing foreign economic activity or operations with securities; 2. departments of the company that collect, process and... ... Great Accounting Dictionary

    back office- auxiliary financial and settlement services that support the life of the company (especially in a bank) ... Dictionary of business slang

    BACK OFFICE- a banking division, a department of a company that performs various documentary operations in the operating rooms for servicing foreign economic activity or operations with securities... Large economic dictionary

    BACK OFFICE- (English back office) is a term used to describe the internal interface (means and rules of interaction in a banking computer system) in departments of a bank or other financial institution whose employees are not involved... ... Financial and credit encyclopedic dictionary

    Back office- A division of a brokerage company that performs office operations that support, but do not include, trading in stocks and other securities. These transactions include all possible written confirmations of transactions and their liquidation,... ... Investment Dictionary

    Back office- - a division of a brokerage company that ensures the execution of transactions after their conclusion and carries out internal accounting and control of transactions with securities... Stocks and bods market. Glossary of basic terms and concepts

    Back office in business architecture A set of business processes, procedures, normative documents (regulations), reference books, printed forms, organizationally staffed units that implement journal (register) accounting of transactions performed ... ... Wikipedia

Books

  • Back office of operations with securities in a bank and investment company, Yu. Yufryakov. 155 pp. The book is devoted to the issues of creating and organizing the work of a securities back office. Based on my more than ten years of experience in the largest Russian investment...