Global custody giant HSBC is shutting down its U.S. fund administration business and will service some of the accounts out of Ireland, according to several media reports.

Private equity firm TPG Capital has beat out rival Advent International in a contest to buy hedge fund administrator GlobeOp Financial.

Change management- it's become a major discipline in recent years as financial firms try to help employees -- and even C level executives --adjust to new policies, mergers and acquisitions or even layoffs.

Strate, the South African securities depository, is in talks with Clearstream about outsourcing its collateral management functions in its domestic market to the Luxembourg-based international securities depository.

The Internal Revenue Service appears to care a lot more about corporations than it does for Wall Street's middle and back office operations executives.

U.S. broker-dealers are supposed to keep track of the accounts which clients may have forgotten about and ensure they have adequate procedures for changing the status of accounts from "abandoned" to active.

Fund managers handling insurance firms' assets, and their custodian banks, had better brace themselves to find the data insurers will need to comply with a pending European regulation designed to help regulators understand their investment risks.

France's Prime Minister Nicolas Sarkozy may think that imposing a transaction tax on French securities deals will court favor with voters come time for re-election in April.

Corporate actions -- dividend, income and reorganizations generate plenty of work for Wall Street operations executives who have to understand what they are all about and communicate the information to investors. This year they will have even more work to do and could end up getting whammied by Uncle Sam if they aren't careful. 

Bank of New York Mellon has become the whipping boy for everyone who wants to complain about being overcharged on their foreign exchange transactions. It is facing allegations of wrongdoing -- and lawsuits from New York, Virginia and Florida's state prosecutors, among others, for fraudulently earning about $2 billion over a decade in executing forex deals on behalf of state and local pension plans.