Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Investment Technician

🎯 Role Definition

The Investment Technician is a hands-on mid-level operations professional responsible for ensuring accurate and timely trade lifecycle processing, reconciliations, settlement, NAV calculations, corporate actions handling, and client reporting across investment portfolios. This role supports portfolio managers and traders, mitigates operational and settlement risk, drives process automation, and maintains governance and documentation for fund and institutional accounts. The ideal candidate combines strong technical aptitude (Excel, SQL, trade systems like Aladdin/Charles River/SimCorp), deep operational knowledge, and excellent stakeholder communication to deliver high-quality, scalable investment operations.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Trade Support Analyst / Trade Processing Associate
Fund Accountant / Fund Operations Analyst
Middle Office Analyst / Operations Analyst

Advancement To:

Senior Investment Technician / Senior Operations Analyst
Portfolio Operations Manager / Fund Operations Manager
Middle Office Team Lead / Head of Trade Support

Lateral Moves:

Fund Accounting Specialist
Risk & Controls Analyst
Product Operations or Client Reporting Specialist

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Process and verify front-to-back trade capture for equities, fixed income, derivatives, FX and mutual funds, ensuring trade details match execution blotters and broker confirmations to minimize exceptions and settlement failures.
Coordinate and monitor trade settlement lifecycle activities, including matching, affirmations, broker confirmations, settlement allocation, and timely escalation for fails, breaks, or misses.
Prepare, calculate and validate NAV and unit pricing for mutual funds and collective investment vehicles, including accruals, income allocation, and pricing exceptions, in accordance with fund prospectuses and accounting policies.
Reconcile daily positions, cash, and corporate action events across custodians, fund accounting systems and portfolio management systems, investigating and resolving discrepancies within SLA targets.
Execute corporate actions processing end-to-end (entitlements, elections, reorganizations, dividends, tender offers), assess impacts on holdings and client accounts, and communicate required elections to stakeholders.
Maintain and enhance trade capture, settlement and reconciliation procedures and checklists; document root causes of recurring breaks and implement process improvements to reduce manual interventions.
Serve as primary liaison to custodians, brokers, prime brokers and transfer agents for settlement issues, failed trades, recalls, and custody reconciliations, ensuring timely resolution and accurate accounting.
Monitor and manage cash forecasting and liquidity events across client portfolios, facilitate cash sweeps, funding, and margin calls, and work closely with treasury or bank operations to optimize settlement outcomes.
Investigate trade exceptions and fails, create incident tickets, drive remediation with counterparties and internal teams, and ensure complete post-trade remediation with audit trails.
Support month-end and quarter-end close activities for funds and managed accounts, including accruals, fee allocation, performance calculations and documentation for auditors and external service providers.
Perform portfolio-level reconciliations (position, corporate action, cash, and fees) against custodian and prime broker statements to confirm accuracy of books and records and produce variance explanations.
Assist with daily and periodic client reporting and regulatory filings by preparing operational data packages, reconciliations, transaction summaries, and supporting materials for client service and compliance teams.
Implement, test and deploy straight-through-processing (STP) enhancements, automation scripts and reconciliations using Excel macros, VBA, SQL queries or platform-specific tools to reduce manual processing time and operational risk.
Support trade allocation and subscription/redemption processes for pooled funds, ensuring accurate allocation of trades and settlement instructions, and reconcile investor-level activity to fund-level records.
Maintain robust controls and adherence to operational SLAs, reconciling fail trends, preparing management metrics and KPI reporting, and participating in control assurance and remediation programs.
Conduct weekly and monthly operational risk reviews, maintain incident logs, update risk registers and escalate material operational incidents to middle office and risk management.
Participate in system implementations, upgrades and data migration projects (Aladdin, SimCorp, Charles River, Bloomberg, etc.), providing functional expertise, user acceptance testing, data validation and cutover support.
Support performance attribution and data validation by delivering clean trade and position data to performance teams and ensuring that corporate actions and FX rates are accurate and timely.
Assist compliance and audit teams by preparing audit-ready documentation, answering operational control questionnaires, and implementing auditor recommendations related to post-trade and fund operations.
Manage vendor and third-party relationships (custodians, transfer agents, fund administrators), assessing service levels, resolving operational tickets and ensuring SLAs are met.
Train and mentor junior operations staff in trade processing, reconciliations, systems use, and control procedures to scale operations and ensure consistent knowledge transfer across the team.
Support ad-hoc queries and investigative work for portfolio managers, relationship managers and client services, delivering clear root-cause analyses and proposed remediation steps.

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 proficiency in trade lifecycle management for multi-asset classes (equities, fixed income, derivatives, FX).
Strong fund accounting and NAV calculation knowledge, including accruals, income allocation and pricing procedures for open- and closed-ended funds.
Advanced Excel skills including pivot tables, advanced formulas, Power Query, and VBA for process automation and reconciliation.
Practical SQL querying skills for data extraction, reconciliation and root-cause analysis from trading and accounting databases.
Familiarity with industry platforms and order/trade management systems such as BlackRock Aladdin, Charles River, SimCorp, Bloomberg, Eikon, Calypso or Advent Geneva.
Working knowledge of settlement communication standards and protocols (SWIFT messages, FIX, broker confirmations).
Experience with custodial and prime broker statement reconciliation processes and tools.
Hands-on experience with corporate actions processing, entitlement calculations and election workflow tools.
Experience with reconciliation platforms (e.g., FIS, BNY Mellon reconciliation systems) and exceptions management tools.
Basic scripting or automation exposure (Python, R or VBA) to support workflows and reduce manual tasks.
Knowledge of regulatory reporting requirements and operational controls (e.g., SEC, CFTC, MiFID II as applicable) and industry best practices.
Familiarity with performance reporting, attribution and fee calculation processes is a plus.
Strong data validation and quality assurance skills, including ability to reconcile large datasets and explain variance.

Soft Skills

Meticulous attention to detail and a quality-first mindset to maintain accurate books and records.
Strong analytical and problem-solving abilities to diagnose breaks and drive solutions to prevent recurrence.
Effective written and verbal communication skills for clear stakeholder interaction with portfolio managers, custodians and clients.
Ability to work under pressure and manage competing priorities in a fast-paced trading environment with tight settlement deadlines.
Collaborative team player who can mentor junior colleagues and coordinate across middle and back office functions.
Process improvement orientation with a bias for automation, standardization and operational efficiency.
Good organizational skills and time management to meet SLAs, month-end closes and project deadlines.
High level of personal accountability and the ability to escalate issues appropriately when risks are identified.
Adaptability and openness to evolving tools, system upgrades and changing regulatory landscapes.
Client-focused mindset with diplomacy and tact when handling sensitive trade or funding issues.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

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

Preferred Education:

Bachelor’s degree with concentration in Financial Markets, Investments or Accounting; Master’s degree (MSc, MBA) considered a plus.
Professional certifications (CFA, CAIA, ACCA, CPA or investment operations certificates) enhance candidacy.

Relevant Fields of Study:

Finance / Investments
Accounting / Financial Reporting
Economics
Mathematics / Statistics
Computer Science / Information Systems

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

1–5 years in investment operations, trade support, fund accounting, or middle office roles.

Preferred:

3–7+ years of hands-on experience with trade lifecycle management, NAV calculations, reconciliations and corporate actions in asset management, mutual fund, ETF or institutional custody environments.
Demonstrated experience with at least one major OMS/PMS or fund administration platform (Aladdin, Charles River, SimCorp, Advent, Bloomberg).
Proven track record of driving process improvements, automation and working with cross-functional project teams on system implementations or upgrades.