For a broker, Firmview serves as the communication layer for the commission management activity taking place in CAS or a similar proprietary system quickly and without additional burdens of support. For an investment manager, Firmview represents a multi-broker means to manage your commission management activity across your multiple broker dealers.

Introduced in response to the desire of Investment Managers to be more involved in knowing what their commission management credits are used for, Firmview is a secure on line portal for scanned invoice presentation, invoice review, approval/rejection and the allocation of mixed usage for soft dollar invoices. Firmview also allows you to view your balance at each broker, enter commission sharing payment instructions with participating brokers, view online broker statements and review tri-party contracts.

Participating Broker/Dealers have the ability to enter invoice data either in CAS or a proprietary soft dollar reporting application and have the information transmitted to the secure portal where using secure log in and passwords investment managers have this information available.

Firmview allows both IM’s and Broker/Dealers a complete audit trail of the approval process for easier management of the process as well as better compliance reporting.

Unlike other portals that have been developed, Firmview represents a shared service provided by Totsys, a non-broker third-party, for numerous Broker/Dealers and significantly reduces the time needed on the IM’s part to approve invoices. Investment Managers only need to remember one log on and one password in order to manage multiple Broker/Dealers. All the information is organized in a user-friendly, efficient manner – not scattered over the portal like some proprietary sites.

• Manager input of payment instructions to CSA/broker sharing research brokerages
• Online review and approval of 28(e) invoices - including scanned invoices
• Manager client balances at a glance across multiple brokerages
• Online client statements
• Online broker trade detail
• Online third-party contracts
• Display of full payment approval lifecycle including payment details for auditing purposes
• All data view downloadable to Excel, Word and PDF files
• Rapid integration with brokerage internal systems

CAS and Firmview work together to create a complete solution to your commission managment needs. CAS resides internally within your brokerage systems (or securely hosted at our server farm if using our ASP option) in order to perform the robust tasks of processing trades, computing trade credit, interfacing with your accounts payable department and producing statements. The data and screens of CAS cannot be seen by a buy side client.

Firmview serves as the communication layer to CAS. As such, vetted information is securely posted to the Firmview portal in a structured manner. As a collaborative portal, the client is able to review and interact with the brokers’ posted information. Through automated updates between CAS and Firmview, buy-side and sell-side users are able to communicate in a structured manner across these two systems.