Subject: confirmations for monterrey office
have a good trip to monterrey . i hope that these bullet points help in your discussions tomorrow . - - sally
? gordon heaney ( houston ) was named as the operations liasion for the monterrey office after the doorstep review during the first quarter . he is fluent in spanish . confirmations have been prepared in houston since the inception of the mexico business .
? since that time , gordon and his boss , joe hunter ( manager over derivatives confirmations ) , have made a trip to monterrey to meet the commercial team and to iron out the process flow for confirmations .
? gordon and joe meet with agustin perez and jaime williams when they are in houston for bid week each month .
? last meeting with agustin and jaime was last week here in houston . primary focus of the conversation was around involving the commercial team in working with counterparties to get executed confirmations back in our hands . our commitment is to get a spreadsheet to agustin and jaime each week that details unexecuted confirmations and responses , or lack thereof , from the counterparties . that way the commercial teams can push with their commercial contacts and gordon can push with his contacts for executed confirmations . the first of these spreadsheets was sent to the monterrey office today , per the commitment from gordon and joe last week .
creation of confirmations : timing has improved since first quarter , as 25 to 30 % of the deals are now done with counterparties who have recently executed isda master agreements . confirmations for deals done with these counterparties are being sent trade date + 1 . for counterparties without master agreements in place , there are often special riders to the confirmations with input required from credit and legal . these confirmations naturally take longer and are going out to the counterparties sometime after trade date + 1 . i have asked joe and gordon to diligently push credit and legal to complete this process more promptly .
execution of confirmations : we have found that the counterparties in mexico are more interested in having the invoice in hand as their documentation on a deal than in returning a signed confirmation to us . this is an education process that we will continue to work on with the help of the commercial team in monterrey .
my opinion : let ' s try the weekly spreadsheet status on unexecuted confirmations for a few weeks and monitor progress . it is my opinion that there is not the depth of business yet in the monterrey office to warrant a fulltime confirmations person located there . i think that the bilingual contact here working closely with the commercial team in monterrey will make a difference .