The EU has set a date for the introduction of MiFID II, the long-awaited legislation from the European Commission which was recently approved by the European Parliament. The decision follows years of consultation and negotiation, but serious reservations remain about how transparency will be applied to non-equity markets.
Shortening settlement cycles and increased regulatory oversight are pushing financial institutions to reform their post-trade processes. That can only be a good thing, according to a new whitepaper from trading technology specialist Fidessa.
Australian broker Macquarie Futures has begun using a cloud-based reconciliation service from Gresham Computing and Amazon Web Services, which the broker says will help it to make its North American derivatives business more efficient.
Italy’s Banca Popolare di Bari has chosen ATM manufacturer NCR to help it revitalise its branch network with a new set of systems that it says will help to cut queues and better connect with customers.
The Fairbanking Foundation, a non-profit charity focused on improving the financial health of consumers, has launched a drive to encourage banking providers to improve their products and achieve an additional 15 Fairbanking Mark certifications from the Foundation by October 2015.
The European Securities and Markets Authority has disputed claims that it should be doing more to help financial institutions connect with trade repositories, following industry complaints that the regulator has not allowed enough time, has issued key specifications at the last minute, and is now scaling back its involvement with the job unfinished.
In a landmark ruling, the US Supreme Court has ruled that the intermediated settlement of financial exchanges is an abstract idea and therefore not patent-eligible. David Puth, chief executive of CLS, which won the case in question. discusses the implications of the ruling.
French trading solutions and connectivity specialist Ullink has agreed to acquire NYFIX and Metabit from ICE Group, as part of a deal the international company says will give it brand recognition in the US and new opportunities in Asia.
The BBA has called for regulators to do more to improve competition in UK retail banking by making changes to the way payments, capital, access to funding and proportionality of regulation are handled and opening up more opportunities for challenger banks.
Rule Financial, the London-based investment banking consultancy, has been acquired by GFT Technologies, adding some €42 million to the German technology firm’s turnover for the second half of this year.
A lesson learned from the global financial crises was how critical free cash flow can be for corporates, their customers, and their suppliers. As businesses seek to unlock cash flow from day-to-day operations, savvy treasurers have discovered vendor payments as a means to extend payment terms while improving vendor health, writes Chris Bozek, Managing Director, Head of Global Trade and Supply Chain Products Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
Banks need to do more to educate consumers about the ways in which they may be exposing themselves to fraud risks, according to a new report by Aite Group using data from ACI Worldwide, which notes that one in four consumers has been victimised by card fraud in the past five years.
Bloomberg Vault has introduced File Analytics, a hybrid cloud-based service that enables firms to “identify, categorise, track and manage” unstructured data held in corporate files and documents.
The explosion of data in the securities and capital markets industry – more than 30% CAGR – is rapidly becoming a problem for market participants and managing that challenge will require a disciplined approach to the development of new data architectures.
One company grateful for the flurry of publicity given to the practice of front-running orders by the publication of Michael Lewis’s book Flash Boys earlier this year is New York-based Trillium, whose Surveyor market manipulation detection tool can be used to detect the practice.
In April, US post-trade utility the DTCC called for the US settlement cycle to be moved to T+2, to bring it into line with what’s happening in the rest of the world, which is converging on T+2 settlement cycles – at different speeds.
Tullett Prebon has launched an aggregated swap data repositories data feed for the interest rate swaps market, aiming to increase price transparency in accordance with the Dodd-Frank Act.
Combining development and operational deployment of software into a more integrated cycle can greatly improve time to market and improve efficiencies giving “10 times faster software driven innovation”, delegates at the annual SifmaTech trading systems conference and exhibition in New York were told.
Despite promises of change heralded by the European Commission’s upcoming MiFID II, the cost of market data in Europe is still far too high and transparency remains a serious problem, according to senior financial industry executives. Yet the arrival of the Market Model Typology standard earlier this year may provide a catalyst for change.
The outsourcing of middle and back office functions by banks and brokers is now the norm, with nearly all firms outsourcing at least part of their functions to specialist providers such as custodian banks.
As the European Parliament adopted MiFID II/MiFIR on 15 April, the financial services industry was left wondering what exactly the new transparency regime is going to mean. Despite a curiously low EC estimate of compliance costs, at between €512 and €732 million, it is clear that MiFID II will have a large impact on the tens of thousands of firms and counterparties that will now fall under its scope.
The Euro Banking Association has published results of research and assessment work on supply chain finance topics and alternative electronic payments, including recommendations on managing financial industry collaboration and partnerships.
A major new effort spearheaded by the Bank of England and the UK Treasury has been launched to shore up the cyber defences of the UK financial services industry, amid rising concerns that testing has exposed serious unaddressed weaknesses.
Turkish bank Yapi Kredi has partnered with mobile money specialist Monitise to develop branchless banking’ services in which the consumer can open an account and carry out all their transactions without the need for physical locations.
Banks are paying lip-service to the concept of customer service and are years behind on innovation – and unless they literally get their act together by collaboratively embracing open software libraries and sharing applications and data, they will not survive.
With the US markets heading in the same direction as Europe and elsewhere, the world is converging on T+2 settlement, albeit at different speeds.
Reporting on the management of intraday liquidity risk will start on a monthly basis from 1 January 2015 to coincide with the implementation of the liquidity coverage ratio reporting requirements. Christian Goerlach of Deutsche Bank, takes a closer look at some of the issues facing global banks.
An question that continues to be asked is will the increased adoption of ISO 20022 facilitate the consolidation of payments clearing utilities and see the introduction of new services for customers? This suggests that despite the fact that ISO 20022 has been around for more than decade, confusion still exists over what it is.
Despite falling costs, banks are continuing to charge “unjustifiable” fees that rip off retailers and consumers as they move away from cash towards debit cards and other forms of payment, according to the British Retail Consortium’s Payments Survey for 2013.
Collateral management as it is currently known will no longer exist within a few years as increased regulatory demands, rising levels of automation and growth of industry tools to optimise collateral transform the industry, according to a new survey and report by Sapient Global Markets.
Kazakhstan’s Eurasian Bank has launched a mobile banking service which offers basic mobile banking features to Kazakh, Russian and English=speaking customers.
As Russia’s revitalised Moscow Exchange begins to command increased attention from global investment banks and hedge funds, a new direct market access service says it can unlock trading features that may not previously have been available to many international investors.
Across the financial services sector, the question is now less about where cloud technology is being used, and more about where it isn’t used. Where do financial institutions draw the line when it comes to deciding whether to keep a process or IT-related service in-house or outsource it to specialists such as Amazon Web Services, SAP and many others?
The speed at which the mobile market evolves is staggering. Just as we started to look at mobile first, where banks need to align their services and strategies to cater for mobile before desktop or other traditional channels, the notion of mobile-only is now creeping to the fore.
Online investment bank Saxo Bank has opened an office in Abu Dhabi to target demand for sophisticated financial services from the increasingly wealthy population of the United Arab Emirates.
Sourcing the right collateral to cover global exposures has risen up the list of priorities for financial institutions in Asia in the past 12 months as concerns mount over a possible collateral shortfall, according to a poll conducted by the Singapore Exchange and Clearstream at the Global Securities Financing Conference Asia 2014 in Singapore.
Given that bank customers are unlikely to increase significantly their usage of ATMs and now that opportunities to deploy large numbers of additional dispensers are limited, what does the future hold for the ATM and where does its next phase of growth lie?
Looked at from a data perspective, many new regulations have overlapping requirements that come back to customer data. Banking Technology joined forces with Markit | Genpact KYC Services and regulatory specialist JWG and recently conducted a survey to look at how firms are approaching the challenges this poses, the survey proved hugely popular with over 200 responses.
Lucera Financial Infrastructures has launched LumeFX, a technology platform that aims to help market participants increase their chances of finding a fill by using a smart order router to find FX liquidity.
In a post-2008 crisis landscape dominated by regulatory reform, compliance is only part of the issue. If firms can address how they manage multiple data sets and deploy a truly enterprise-wide model, they can capitalise on the real opportunity – achieving a competitive advantage.
