The competition that will be introduced by the European Central Bank’s (ECB’s) Target2-Securities (T2S) project among CSDs is an “opportunity” said Jesús Benito, chief executive at Iberclear. In simplifying the post-trade infrastructure of Europe, T2S is prompting new competitive forces, market entrants, challenges and even creating new words.
Global financial markets are experiencing a paradigm shift as governments, regulators and participants recalibrate the processes and structures underpinning global finance. The challenge is to repair and remedy where needed, with dialogue between central banks, regulators and participants, but also to avoid creating fragmented markets or worse, unintentionally reintroducing risk.
A sustained rally in frontier markets is leading an expansion of size and liquidity as investors seek opportunities that are not available in the developed or emerging markets, according to a new report by research house Aite.
Swiss post-trade company SIX Securities Services has allied with Belgium’s Euroclear Bank in a deal aimed at Swiss private banks and their high net worth customers.
London and Singapore are fast closing the gap on Hong Kong in the race to become centres for offshore renminbi business and capitalise on Beijing’s ambition to make the RMB a global currency.
Regulators in the US and Europe are stepping up investigations into dark pool activity, market abuse and manipulation of financial benchmarks following a spate of damaging incidents in recent months. Tougher regulatory oversight could have a significant impact on all three areas, according to a new report by financial services technology provider SunGard.
A new app-based social network that uses gamification concepts to train traders and help them to hone their skills has been launched by a former Deutsche Bank trader.
As the global banks grapple with tides of regulation, fines, and a myriad of other post-crisis issues, local Asian institutions are tooling up and stepping in to fill the gaps.
ACI, the foreign exchange industry body, has called for the adoption of a new Model Code for sell-side and buy-side firms on financial benchmarks, to harmonise codes of conduct and prevent a recurrence of the Libor and other recent rate fixing scandals.
Firms in Hong Kong are ramping up system roll-outs in anticipation of the forthcoming Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect, scheduled to go live in mid-October.
But the proposed link will face a number of problems,
A Financial Conduct Authority investigation that found banks and brokers are failing to provide best execution highlights the need for more responsibility and education among their buy-side customers.
The Australian Securities and Investments Commission has launched a consultation on proposed changes to the trade reporting rules for OTC derivatives, in a move that suggests Australia is learning the lessons of OTC reforms in other countries.
Trading technology firm Corvil has launched a new streaming analytics platform which it says will help exchanges, banks, brokers and other trading firms to sweep away the IT failures of the past and learn to better understand the market.
Commissioner Scott O’Malia of the US Commodity and Futures Trading Commission has called for continuing international co-operation on market surveillance and warned that current oversight mechanisms are flawed in terms of the data they collect and the way that they analyse it.
Regulators across the globe appear divided on the question of whether tighter control of algorithmic trading is necessary: the Australians are pretty laid back about it, the Germans are ahead of the game, while political debate rages in the US …
MiFID II could cause serious problems for banks, brokers and other market participants in the run up to the January 2017 implementation, according to executives attending a meeting chaired by the European Securities Markets Authority in Paris earlier this week.
As China prepares to open an options market for the first time later this year, big changes are afoot in Asia’s biggest market. French trading technology specialist Horizon Software talks to Banking Technology about the kind of tools that will be needed to liberalise the Chinese economy.
As the implementation of T2S approaches, there is still a gap between the readiness levels of different types of market participant, new Celent research finds. But a ‘wait and see’ approach can only take some firms so far, argues Isabelle Olivier, head of clearing and settlement EMEA at Swift
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
ICAP has launched a swap execution facility in the UK, as part of a push to dominate both the European and the US OTC derivatives markets as they are brought under new regulation.
The capital markets industry continues to be amongst the top data driven industries. Electronic trading generates millions of market messages during a given day. With diminishing returns in high-frequency trading, focus has shifted from high-speed trading to looking for patterns in large volumes of market data for financial information and use cases.
Swift’s Innotribe Startup Challenge has named the five European finalists for its annual competition, which seeks to find the best new companies in financial services and bring them to compete in the final at Sibos Boston in October.
The introduction of a financial transaction tax could mean London losing a swathe of banking business to financial centres with a lighter regulatory regime, such as Hong Kong or Singapore not to mention the logistical and technical challenges for banks.
The purpose of the European Central Bank’s T2S project is ill-defined and taking so long to deliver that it is being pushed aside by other projects according to speakers at the Swift Business Forum in London.
Nearly three months after the European Commission’s 12 February deadline for trade reporting, market participants are still not ready to report their derivative trades and serious problems remain with understanding the rules.
