Goldman Sachs has launched a new FICC Systematic Market Making (SMM) unit. SMM will consolidate its e-trading assets and capabilities across FICC. The move was reported in an internal memo as reflecting changes in market structure and client needs. The memo, signed by several executives including group chief information officer Martin Chavez, says, “Our ability to […]
The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) has published its 2016 supervisory priorities for credit rating agencies (CRAs) and trade repositories (TRs). The regulatory authority reports seeing a number of changes in the CRA and TR industries during 2015, with new applicants for registration in both sectors, and current authorised entities seeking to develop their […]
Investment manager AllianceBernstein is working with Interactive Data, to help evaluate its trade execution quality and perform transaction cost analysis (TCA). The work will be done across various mutual funds and separately managed portfolios using Interactive Data’s Best Execution (Best Ex) service. The service leverages its Continuous Evaluated Fixed-Income Pricing to run TCA for fixed-income […]
Morgan Stanley has appointed Naureen Hassan as chief digital officer for Wealth Management, a new position in which she will lead the strategy and marketing of digital tools and platforms serving the firm’s 16,000 financial advisors and 3.5 million clients. Naureen Hassan served most recently as executive vice president, Investment Services Segments and Platforms at […]
The largest vendors in the trader voice market are now in a similar position to IBM in the late 1990s: their solutions are proprietary, expensive to maintain, and lacking true open integration …
Market operator Nasdaq has seen revenues from its technology sales increase, with its Technology Solutions division, which makes up 27% of total net revenues reach $146 million in the fourth quarter of 2015, up from $4 million from the fourth quarter of 2014. The exchange’s Market Technology unit, which accounts for 13% of total net revenues, […]
Global investment and private bank, UBS, has signed an agreement to expand its use of the AppDynamics Application Intelligence Platform across its critical applications to supports its digital transformation initiatives. “Using AppDynamics we have been able to improve the speed at which we identified and remediated application issues, as well as avoid incidents in the […]
In a new whitepaper, the US post-trade infrastructure provider Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC), has voiced its belief that the financial services industry “has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reimagine and modernise its infrastructure” by employing blockchain in a coordinated manner. Blockchain is the transaction model used to transfer ownership of crypto-currency bitcoin. It was developed […]
Cognitive computing specialist CustomerMatrix, a co-founder of forum Cognitive Computing Consortium, has closed US$10.5 million in Series-B funding. The investment, one in a series of investments in artificial intelligence-like technologies in 2016, was led by HSBC, with participation from Aster Capital, and existing investors Newfund and True Global Ventures. CustomerMatrix, which offers a predictive engine called […]
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
IG Group has launched a trading app for the Apple Watch, which it says is one of the first of its kind. The Apple Watch is due to be released on 24 April.
Long-term investors are deeply concerned about their ability to find liquidity, with nearly 90% afraid that predatory high-frequency traders are preying on their flows, according to a new survey by block-trading network Liquidnet.
Financial market regulations across the globe are increasingly focusing on risk management. This includes ensuring it is clear who firms are trading with and for, and confirming that firms can identify the instruments being traded. As a result, the field of reference data is increasingly held under the regulatory microscope and that lens extends to the standards used to identify financial instruments, writes Chris Pickles.
Temenos has moved into the fund administration business with a €235 million acquisition of Luxembourg-based Multifonds, which counts a number of Tier 1 institutions as users of its fund administration platform.
