Nordic bank Alandsbanken has chosen risk management tools from SunGard, which it says will help the bank to comply with new financial regulations. SunGard’s Ambit Risk and Ambit Performance products will be used by the bank to manage interest rate and liquidity risk and help the bank keep track of its balance sheet.
Bank of America Merrill Lynch has launched a service aimed at helping smaller banks to cope with Dodd-Frank rules for US cross-border trades.
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.
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.
European payment processor Equens plans to offer a number of services to the Dutch business community to support them in the migration to Single Euro Payments Area formats
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”.
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.
They were never going to be happy in Switzerland about the US FATCA legislation that will be used to hunt down people avoiding US taxes, but it’s a surprise to hear that some Swiss burghers are feeling sorry for a group of US citizens who have become part of the fabric of society there.
New rules and regulations for financial benchmarks following the Libor scandal will come into effect next Monday, says the Financial Services Authority, and will follow the recommendations of the Wheatley Review.
The shift to SEPA offers significant benefits to businesses – from lower bank fees on euro payments and direct debits to opportunities to streamline processes.
The European Central Bank says that the speed of adopion of direct debits in line with the Single Euro Payments Area standards is “unacceptable” and urged regulators and payment service providers to make greater efforts to push the instrument or risk damaging the reputation of the scheme.
As Europe’s new EMIR derivatives regulation takes hold, senior buy-side representatives have warned that new rules including EMIR and Basel III might actually exacerbate risks rather than reduce them.
The Illinois Department of Financial & Professional Regulation recently released five cease and desist orders from January 2013 against six entities for unlicensed activities under the state’s Transmitters of Money Act. These six entities offer a variety of services in Illinois, including domestic and international money transfer, bill payment services and prepaid cards. One of […]
The Federal Reserve Board (Fed) quietly released changes to its FAQs on Reg. II’s restrictions on debit card interchange fees and routing. Five new FAQs were added and one existing FAQ was revised. Changes in two areas directly affect prepaid cards: the exemption for “general use prepaid cards” and the requirement for adding a second […]
Technology and information companies CGI and Experian have partnered to help Europe’s banks and corporates meet the requirements of SEPA, the Single Euro Payments Area, on direct debits.
Market data vendor Interactive Data has responded to the introduction of Financial Transaction Taxes in France and Italy with a new service that supports the identification of instruments that are likely to be subject to them.
The Royal Bank of Scotland has announced a new product intended to help clients migrate to mandatory SEPA standards. Called the RBS SEPA Accelerator, the product has a feature that allows a corporate implementing the SEPA XML file format to independently initiate, monitor and amend file testing, validation and end-to-end simulation. This ensures that a corporate can self-test its SEPA readiness.
The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation will start operating a Japanese over-the-counter derivatives trade repository this month, flowing approval by the Financial Services Agency of Japan.
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.
The Basel Committee is planning to start checking on firms’ risk data aggregation plans from early 2013 but awareness surrounding the issues remains low.
As the deadline for mandatory swaps reporting approaches for more and more asset types, US post-trade services utility the DTCC has announced that swaps dealers are now submitting OTC derivatives trade information for all five major asset classes into its US swaps data repository, DDR.
With the January 2014 deadline looming on the horizon, financial organisations are realising that fast action is needed, and needed now, in order to be able to meet the first FATCA deadline for new account on-boarding.
The imposition of a financial transaction tax in Italy on Friday has prompted condemnation from senior financial market observers, who are warning that the new rules could tip Europe into a liquidity drought that will damage banks and asset managers, punish traditional market participants and encourage a slide away from equities towards other asset classes.
More stringent restrictions on outsourcing arrangements affecting all suppliers could lead to increased costs across the board for financial services firms.
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?
Blog: New Credit Card Surcharges Could Impact Prepaid Market February 2013 By Lori Breitzke, E&S Consulting LLC A proposed settlement agreement in the In re Payment Card Interchange Fee and Merchant Discount Antitrust Litigation—filed in 2005 on behalf of approximately 7 million merchants alleging, among other claims, that MasterCard and Visa had separately colluded […]
Financial services firms are being forced to become increasingly risk-focused due to the continuing pressure of regulation, according to a new survey by Thomson Reuters.
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.
Orange Business Services – Trading Solutions has launched a collaboration with Bloomberg Vault that will record voice data in real time, so that brokers can better comply with regulation on record keeping.
Dutch bank ABN Amro has been fined by Nasdaq OMX Stockholm for a technology failure that led to an erroneous order entering the market.
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?
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.
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 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.
February 2013 By Adam Perrotta, Assistant Editor Dozens of prepaid program managers are scrambling to find a new bank issuer with First California Bank (FCB) exiting the issuing business ahead of its acquisition by PacWest Bancorp. In November, PacWest agreed to pay $231 million for FCB’s parent company, Westlake Village, Calif.-based First California Financial […]
The National Bank of Abu Dhabi has adopted a monitoring service from Canadian technology company Inetco Systems, which it says will enable it to better keep track of its ATMs and ensure they are working properly.
Recovery and resolution plans have been on the minds (and to-do lists) of ops and tech departments at the world’s biggest banks ever since they were mandated by the G20 in 2011.
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.
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.
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.
