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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Investment Clerk

💰 $40,000 - $70,000

Investment OperationsCustodyPortfolio AccountingTrade Support

🎯 Role Definition

An Investment Clerk is a core operations professional responsible for accurate and timely processing of investment transactions, reconciliations, settlement management, corporate actions handling, and client reporting support. This role ensures the integrity of portfolio records, supports month-end and NAV calculations, liaises with custodians, brokers and portfolio managers, and maintains regulatory and audit-ready documentation. The ideal candidate combines strong attention to detail, proven transaction processing experience, and fluency with custody and portfolio systems (e.g., Bloomberg, SWIFT, Aladdin, Charles River, SimCorp), plus excellent written and verbal communication skills.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Operations Analyst / Operations Assistant
  • Finance Clerk / Accounting Clerk
  • Administrative or Back-Office Support roles

Advancement To:

  • Senior Investment Clerk / Senior Operations Analyst
  • Portfolio Accountant / Fund Accountant
  • Operations Manager / Head of Investment Operations

Lateral Moves:

  • Trade Support Analyst
  • Client Reporting Analyst
  • Corporate Actions Specialist

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Process and book buy/sell transactions across equities, fixed income, mutual funds, ETFs and FX, ensuring accurate trade capture, correct settlement instructions and timely confirmation with brokers and counterparties.
  • Monitor and manage daily trade settlement cycles (T+0/T+1/T+2), initiate and resolve fails, liaise with custodians and counterparties to remediate breaks and finalize settlements.
  • Perform daily cash and position reconciliations between the portfolio accounting system, custodian statements and internal ledgers, researching and explaining variances to closure.
  • Prepare, review and post journal entries and accruals required for month-end and NAV calculations, ensuring balances are complete and accurately classified.
  • Execute corporate actions processing including dividends, splits, mergers, rights issues and proxy voting instructions; verify entitlements and update records to reflect elections and outcomes.
  • Conduct trade matching and affirmation activities, including STP (straight-through processing) monitoring, and escalate unmatched trades for prompt resolution.
  • Maintain and update trade and account documentation, including trade tickets, confirmations, custody instructions, and audit trails consistent with internal control policies and regulatory requirements.
  • Support daily cash management by tracking inflows/outflows, performing cash forecasting, initiating funding transfers and reconciling bank and custodian cash positions.
  • Reconcile broker and prime broker statements, ensure margin requirements are met, and calculate or escalate margin calls where appropriate.
  • Assist with NAV calculation processes by validating pricing inputs, reasonableness checks, accruals and expense allocations; prepare reconciliations and variance explanations for portfolio managers.
  • Investigate and resolve fails, breaks and exception reports using internal systems and external counterparties; document root causes and implement corrective actions to reduce recurrence.
  • Maintain and update client and account setup information, beneficiary details, mandates and documentation required for KYC/AML and custody operations.
  • Generate and distribute client-facing reports, daily statements and performance outputs, ensuring data accuracy, on-time delivery and compliance with client SLAs.
  • Prepare and support internal and external audits by assembling transaction, settlement and reconciliation evidence and responding to auditor queries with clear, documented explanations.
  • Execute FX settlements and cross-currency cash movements, ensuring correct conversions, booking and hedging entries are recorded in systems and reconciled.
  • Process subscription and redemption orders for funds, unit creation/redemption events, and update ledger balances accordingly while confirming cash movements.
  • Maintain accurate pricing and market data inputs (priced securities, corporate actions rates) in portfolio systems and verify feeds from vendors; escalate anomalies to data teams.
  • Support regulatory and statutory reporting obligations by compiling required transaction and position data, ensuring timely submission and accurate documentation.
  • Update and maintain operational procedures, runbooks and process documentation; contribute to process improvement and automation initiatives to increase STP rates and reduce manual intervention.
  • Coordinate with internal teams—portfolio managers, risk, compliance, middle office—and external parties—custodians, transfer agents, brokers—to resolve operational inquiries and improve workflows.
  • Perform daily system health checks, exception monitoring, and reconciliations within investment operations platforms (e.g., Aladdin, Charles River, SimCorp), and coordinate with IT to remediate system or data issues.
  • Support margin and collateral management activities, validate collateral movements, reconcile pledged assets, and ensure compliance with collateral agreements and regulatory requirements.
  • Lead or support special projects, including system implementations, process automation, and migration activities, providing subject matter expertise on operational impacts and testing results.
  • Prepare ad-hoc analyses and management reports on operational KPIs (e.g., settlement fail rates, reconciliation aging, processing cycle times) and propose action plans for improvement.

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)

  • Trade processing and settlement expertise across equities, fixed income, funds and FX instruments.
  • Strong reconciliation skills (positions, cash, broker, custodian, NAV) with ability to research and close breaks.
  • Knowledge of corporate actions lifecycle and operational processing (entitlements, elections, postings).
  • Familiarity with custody and fund administration systems (examples: BlackRock Aladdin, Charles River, SimCorp Dimension, Advent Geneva, SS&C).
  • Proficiency with market data and pricing validation and vendor feeds (Bloomberg, Refinitiv/Reuters).
  • Experience with SWIFT messaging, MT/MX formats, and settlement instruction workflows.
  • Solid Excel skills including pivot tables, VLOOKUP/XLOOKUP, formulas and intermediate VBA for process automation.
  • Basic SQL/querying capability to extract and manipulate operational data for investigations and reporting.
  • Understanding of NAV calculation mechanics, journal posting and month-end close processes.
  • Working knowledge of regulatory and compliance frameworks relevant to investment operations (KYC, AML, MiFID II, SEC/FINRA reporting).
  • Experience with trade matching and affirmation platforms, STP optimization, and exception management.
  • Familiarity with fund accounting concepts, general ledger reconciliation, and posting of reclasses/corrections.

Soft Skills

  • Exceptional attention to detail and accuracy when processing high volumes of financial transactions.
  • Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with a commitment to root-cause resolution.
  • Clear and professional written and verbal communication for interactions with portfolio managers, clients, custodians and auditors.
  • Time management and prioritization skills to meet daily cutoffs and month-end deadlines under pressure.
  • Team-oriented mindset with the ability to collaborate across operations, technology, and front-office teams.
  • Proactive attitude toward process improvement and automation; comfortable challenging legacy processes.
  • High integrity and adherence to compliance, controls, and confidentiality standards.
  • Adaptability and learning agility to adopt new systems, workflows and regulatory changes.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor’s degree in Finance, Accounting, Economics, Business Administration or related field; or equivalent professional experience in investment operations.

Preferred Education:

  • Bachelor’s or Associate degree with coursework in finance, accounting, or securities operations; professional certifications (e.g., Investment Operations Certificate, CFA Level 1, CAMS) a plus.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Finance
  • Accounting
  • Economics
  • Business Administration
  • Financial Engineering / Quantitative Finance

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 1 – 4 years of hands-on investment operations, custody, fund administration, or trade support experience.

Preferred: 2+ years in a buy-side or sell-side operations role with demonstrable experience in trade settlement, reconciliations, corporate actions, and use of industry-standard systems (Aladdin, Charles River, SimCorp, Bloomberg, SWIFT).

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