2015 has been a year of extensive discussion about what role blockchain can play in making processes in the financial services industry more efficient. It has also been a year where both banks and start-ups have been testing whether distributed ledger technology can adequately replace costly legacy systems and improve securities processing, writes Brian Collings. […]
There is an uncanny similarity between Prime Minster David Cameron’s emphasis of moving from a “low wage, high tax, high welfare society to a higher wage, lower tax, and lower welfare society” and a shifting focus among the asset management community.
It is a well-known fact that banks have two types of technology: Cold War-era IBM mainframes running Cobol-based batch programmes and Evil Genius HFT systems. The mundane truth is that any financial services operation will have a range of hardware and software systems of different vintages and spend a lot of time and money living with the consequences.
Either the distributed ledger is the greatest revolution in financial services for a generation, or it will make little difference to anything, according to the strongly divided opinions expressed by speakers at the Mondo Visione Exchange Forum in London last week.
Deutsche Börse strengthened its links with mainland China this week with the establishment of a partnership with the Shanghai Stock Exchange and China Financial Futures Exchange to create new marketplace for the trading of renminbi-denominated offshore products under the new brand of the China Europe International Exchange.
The London Stock Exchange Group is planning to launch a new interest rate derivatives venture called CurveGlobal, which initially aims to offer short term interest rate futures. Backed by several banks including Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Barclays, Citi, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Société Générale, the new venture is part of the exchange’s long-held ambition to gain traction in the derivatives markets, which have historically been dominated by rivals in continental Europe.
SETL, the institutional payment and settlement infrastructure based on blockchain technology, claims to have which has broken the 1 billion transactions-per-day capacity barrier for blockchain movements in a test network.
T2S, Europe’s harmonised settlement platform, is live. With a series of migration waves scheduled up until full live operation in July 2017, the next few years are likely to be characterised by intense activity as market participants finalise their strategies …
London Stock Exchange and The Depository Trust & Clearing are partnering to provide clients with a connection to the LSE’s UnaVista Approved Reporting Mechanism. The service will allow DTCC clients to comply with the Markets in Financial Instruments Regulation through their current connection from DTCC’s Global Trade Repository.
A new online market for buying and selling financial research has gone live in Europe. Focused on providing buy-side firms with more transparency, the new RSRCHXexchange is based in the cloud and is aimed at helping institutions comply with MiFID II research unbundling requirements.
Saxo Bank is to allow access to its multi-asset trading and back office infrastructure through a new open API that will allow developers and partners to integrate Saxo’s trading functionality into their own applications and systems.
Nine major global investment banks have formed a partnership to explore the potential of distributed ledger technology in financial markets. The project, led by financial technology company R3, aims to create early standards for the emerging technology that will make it easier and more efficient as it grows.
The London Stock Exchange has sold its Proquote market data and retail trading services business to Australian financial technology specialist Iress, which is expanding its capital markets and funds operations in the UK.
The London Stock Exchange says that the launch of Turkish derivatives on its derivatives market represents part of the long-cherished goal of growing its derivatives business around the world. It also represents the exchange’s ‘open access’ policy.
The International Securities Services Association adopted a set of compliance principles to address the “critical challenges” posed by financial crime. The new principles aim to establish “a clear global standard for the opening and maintenance of cross-border securities accounts”.
BNY Mellon expects to have its SunGard InvestOne system back to normal today following testing over the weekend and the US Labor Day holiday and have caught up on the generation of net asset values for clients.
Global capital markets specialist, Hatstand, has launched a cyber-security risk assessment service that will enable businesses to better understand the current state of their preparedness against the risk of cyber-attacks and identify any shortfalls in their existing governance programmes.
Nomura’s equities execution unit, Instinet Europe, is to offer cash management and payment services to purchasers of its investment research products following authorisation from the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority to operate as a payment institution.
Project Neptune, the fixed income trading initiative between a group of 42 large banks and asset managers, has gone live with its pilot production network, bringing the project closer to its ‘hard’ platform later this year.
Regulations aimed at transparency across financial markets may be making things simpler for the regulators, but they are making life more complex for banks, according to Sven Ludwig, senior vice president, risk management and analytics EMEA, at SunGard.
South Africa’s Johannesburg Stock Exchange is moving its derivatives and fixed income markets onto Millennium Exchange, the trading platform it bought from the London Stock Exchange when it moved its equities market earlier this year.
Technology is equipping non-bank market-makers to move into the US Treasury Market, giving them analytics and speed to manage and hedge risk, while enhancing market liquidity. “Market makers have been deploying electronic tools at varying degrees over the past decade,” says Anthony Perrotta, a principal and head of fixed income research at Tabb Group, author […]
Boat Services now supports the post trade publication of Russian OTC trading, by including stocks listed on the Moscow Exchange. The addition covers more than 300 Russian security instruments, including common and preferred stocks.
ICAP has become the first UK institution to implement a range of enterprise data governance systems from Oracle, replacing a legacy process involving manual spreadsheet maintenance and frequent e-mail exchanges.
Post-trade market infrastructure the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation has launched a new centralised data provisioning service, DTCC Data Products and expanded its exchange traded funds and ISO 20022 corporate actions data offerings.
BBVA Group has entered a multi-year agreement with Broadridge Financial Solutions) for a post-trade managed service to support its institutional fixed income business in the US. Under the agreement, Broadridge will provide an integrated managed service to support fixed income and repurchase agreement processing, international clearance and settlement and investor communications services
The funds industry has successfully implemented the requirements of the Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive over the past year but has doubts about the use of data being gathered by regulators and question whether it is helping regulators to better spot threats and systemic risks that may impact market stability.
The need for financial institutions to accurately gauge their exposure to myriad sources of risk has seldom, if ever, been greater. The credit crisis toward the end of the last decade must have made that clear, and if bankers managed to avoid getting the message back then, the point has been driven home ever since by regulators around the world
TABB Group forecasts global compliance spending among capital markets firms will some increase 7.5% to 8% in 2015, reaching $2.592 billion , and growing at a similar pace for 2016, driven by global regulations that require institutions to expand coverage, enhance existing capabilities and standardise compliance solutions and processes.
As the European Commission’s MiFID II legislation moved towards implementation of technical standards, some of Europe’s national regulators are seriously worried that mandatory open access to CCPs may not be such a good idea. Concerns about the ability to manage risk and the ability to effectively handle data were highlighted by speakers at the IDX FIA conference in London yesterday.
Swift has formally launched a new business intelligence solution for securities market participants following the completion of an early adopter programme. Watch for Securities is “ready for full scale use” by local and global custodians, investment banks, asset managers and broker/dealers, allowing them to monitor and gain business insights from their network traffic.
Karla McKenna has been named head of standards at the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation on a year’s secondment from Citi, where she is director of market practice and standards.
Treasury and capital markets software specialist Calypso Technology has developed “an industrialised blueprint for reducing complexity and cost in banks”. The Calypso Bank-in-a-Box was developed in collaboration with a group of global banks to consolidate and document their processes and systems in the face of market and regulatory changes.
MCO Europe, exclusive distributor of the McObject high performance database financial markets in the UK and Europe, is raising investment through Crowdcube, the UK’s largest crowdfunding site, to fund growth and expansion. McObject’s eXtremeDB Financial Edition high-performance database is used for trading and risk management by banks, fund managers, brokers and data vendors.
Deutsche Börse plans a joint venture with the Shanghai Stock Exchange and China Financial Futures Exchange to develop and market Chinese-based financial instruments to investors outside mainland China.
The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority’s study into competition in investment and corporate banking will focus on choice, transparency, bundling and cross-subsidisation in debt and equity capital markets, mergers and acquisitions and acquisition financing. It will also consider links between competition in these primary market services and related activities such as corporate lending and broking, and ancillary services.
Three-quarters of market participants use the FIX protocol for confirmation and affirmation of their transactions, according to a new survey released by financial industry standards body the FIX Trading Community.
A decade ago, one of the driving factors behind outsourcing was reducing cost and headcount. However, with the growing regulatory and compliance burden, firms are increasingly becoming more cautious about outsourcing.
ABN Amro plans to implement the Temenos WealthSuite integrated wealth management platform for its international private banking business. It will also be able to extend the use of the T24 core system to its private banking and diamond & jewellery business, giving it one platform with one operating model across multiple business lines.
With the recent pension reforms opening up a plethora of investment options, financial services providers need to capitalise on the opportunity to create a value-led digital customer proposition
