Risk Management


BCBS: getting back to first principles

At first glance, the Basel Committee’s new Principles for stronger banking risk governance appear to represent another huge change management challenge for global institutions.

Angry TradeTech delegates clash over HFT

A session at Trade Tech in London fell into chaos earlier today, as furious delegates hurled accusations across the table and members of the audience sparred aggressively with panellists.

IPS 2013: SEPA benefits hard to see for corporates

As the February 2014 deadline for implementation of Single Euro Payment Area compatible instruments approaches, focus is moving from banks to corporates – and the increasingly clear picture is that few European corporates see any great benefit from adopting the standards involved.

Beyond a joke

A journalist, a politician and a banker walk into a bar … sounds like the beginning of a joke, doesn’t it? Feel free to submit a punchline: personally, I’m starting to think that it would be a very sour joke. With banker-bashing now an established national pastime, the press having spectacularly fouled their own nest […]

State banking: reforming the UK infrastructure

At the beginning of March, George Osborne travelled to the English seaside town of Bournemouth to make a speech at the JP Morgan operations centre there. It wasn’t Henry V’s St Crispin’s Day speech, but it may well go down as a watershed moment in the history of the UK financial services sector. Osborne is […]

Competition regulation will stifle payments innovation

Proposed policies intended to promote competion in payments could stifle innovation and standardisation in the payments and transaction banking sectors, according to a partner in a leading law firm. Dermot Turing, partner in the international financial institutions and markets group at Clifford Chance, told delegates at the International Payments Summit in London that moves by […]

Venn Partners unveils structured products risk tool

Credit advisory and investment partnership Venn Partners has launched Venn Risk Analytics, a financial analysis platform that it says will provide an independent and transparent approach to the analysis and valuation of structure finance products.

Mirror, mirror: how does your risk data look?

Following the release of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision’s Principles for Effective Risk Data Aggregation, middle and back office professionals in major financial centres now find themselves with a number of difficult questions, that senior management must be able to answer and evidence.

Citi sets out segregated collateral service

As tough new rules requiring the collateralisation of OTC derivatives take hold in Europe and the US, Citi has retooled its OpenInvestor investment services to include segregated collateral custody accounts – a move the bank says will help mitigate counterparty risk and improve collateral efficiency.

Riding the OTC rollercoaster

As new rules for OTC derivatives take hold in Europe and in the US, banks and asset managers face a complex cocktail of mandatory clearing, reporting and increased collateral requirements.

Mizuho adopts Basel III compliance toolkit as rules tighten

Japan’s Mizuho International has adopted the common reporting, financial reporting and liquidity coverage ratio modules of Wolters Kluwer’s Basel III toolkit, which is designed to help banks cope as regulators tighten the screws on the banking sector’s capital requirements.

CME Group partners with MarkitServ for OTC FX clearing

US derivatives giant CME Group and OTC trade processing service MarkitServ have connected to support clearing for OTC FX transactions, ahead of new regulations in the US and Europe on the central clearing of OTC contracts.

Avoiding spreadsheet Hell

The JP Morgan Task Force Report into its Chief Investment Office’s $6 billion-plus loss found the bank’s Value at Risk was being calculated with an Excel spreadsheet that “required time-consuming manual inputs to entries and formulas, which increased the potential for errors”.

FSA’s swansong opens a fast track for new entrant banks

In future, the possibility of a bank failure will be accepted as a normal market process, and barriers to entry for new start-ups, including a removal of capital requirement obstacles, will be removed, the Financial Services Authority and the Bank of England have confirmed.

FATCA: joining the KYC dots?

FATCA compliance might not need a separate programme – it ought to be covered by the same approach as AML, RDR and KYC regulations, among others.

Mixing up the pieces

The introduction of a seven-day account switching service in the autumn is meant to increase competition among UK High Street banks. Will it succeed?

Data protection: the next Y2K?

Transatlantic friction over data protection isn’t exactly a new problem – the industry has been faced with pending regulations for over a decade, but the conflicting demands of European data privacy and US intelligence gathering legislation are coming together to make the issue a serious problem for banking technologists.

SEPA Uncertainty

Big banks and their large corporate clients are in the final stages of preparation for the SEPA end date of February next year, but what about the smaller clients in the non-euro countries?

ESMA guidelines could reshape European market making

New guidelines published earlier this month by European regulator ESMA could have a major impact on market making across Europe, according to Matthew Coupe, director of regulation and market structure at NICE Actimize.

EU/US face-off over FISA on the cards

It has been clear for some time now that some of the regulations coming into force around the globe contain contradictions and inconsistencies. A large part of the work done by JWG, Banking Technology‘s  partner for our regular RegTech coverage, has been in identifying these, working out their impact on systems and processes and what issues […]

European exchanges unveil MSCI derivatives

European exchanges Eurex and NYSE Liffe are soon to list a host of new derivatives, based on MSCI indices. From March, market participants will be able to trade futures and options based on the MSCI World, MSCI Europe, MSCI All Countries Asia Pacific ex-Japan and futures on the MSCI Frontier Markets.

Will Dodd-Frank trade reporting prepare you for EMIR?

On February 28, most of the approximately 70 registered swap dealers will stumble across the finishing line for the remaining asset classes of the CFTC implementation of Dodd-Frank trade reporting regulations. Some may be forgiven for breathing a sigh of relief.

Legal Entity Identifiers: between a “ROC” and hard decisions

As the global method of identifying entities and their ownership structures, the Legal Entity Identifier forms a central part of the G20’s crisis-prevention toolbox. After a few chaotic years of LEI debate and design, regulators are finally nearing the long anticipated starting line for use of the world’s first singular identifier.

HFT: time to talk about how?

2012 seemed like the year of regulators taking a prolonged look at computer trading – defining what it might be, its potential effects, why it may be problematic. It is still far from clear that we have answers to these fundamental questions.

OTC derivatives reforms must be global, says DTCC

As new rules for the reporting of OTC derivatives draw closer around the globe, US post-trade services utility the DTCC is positioning itself as the provider of a global network of trade repositories – but OTC derivatives reform will only work if consistent measures are taken everywhere, says Stewart Macbeth, president and chief executive at the DTCC.

Securities lending: illuminating data?

Regulatory data collection tools have been refined, standardised identifiers nearly constructed and more frequent and granular reporting rolled into regulation. Now that regulators have this mass of data, what is the next step in linking it and putting it to use?

Activ expands Canadian coverage ahead of “naked access” ban

Market data and technology company Activ Financial has expanded its risk gateway tool to cover all Canadian exchanges, ahead of new rules that will require market participants in Canada to have pre-trade risk controls in place across all asset classes from next month.