On August 31 BNY Mellon was finally able to report the completion of the “production of system-generated net asset values  for exchange-traded funds through August 28”, which was delayed due to a SunGard-hosted fund account platform malfunctioning on August 22.

The timing of the malfunction was particularly unfortunate as it occurred just as the markets entered several days of very high volatility and much higher than normal trading volumes, making the process of re-calculating the NAV’s that much more complex.

The software error does now seem closer to resolution, as the latest developments indicate that BNY Mellon’s backlog has been temporarily caught up, with last Friday’s NAVs finalized but not yet fully verified, over the weekend.

Gerald Hassell, BNY Mellon’s chairman and CEO, held a conference call with clients late Sunday, informing them that the full restoration of SunGard’s platform “has taken far longer than any of us would have expected.”

The slow solution has caused the company to double its resources in manually processing and calculating NAV’s, a process which takes significantly longer than the software would usually take. In addition, BNY Mellon established a team this week to check and validate the calculations manually reached by its team last week, a process that will also take some time to complete.

The outage which has affected 66 of the bank’s fund account clients and approximately 1,200 fund structures and has prompted directors and executives to hold emergency meetings to look over data pricing and address any legal ramifications.

The exact cause of the problem however, is still a mystery. According to SunGard, the Wayne-based financial software company, the most likely reason is not the system being hacked as was first thought, but rather it was caused by an operating system change.

“SunGard technical teams, along with those of key technology partners, have been working diligently with BNY Mellon to restore a production environment and to clear the processing backlog,” stated SunGard. “Returning BNY Mellon to normal operations is a matter of the highest priority for SunGard.”