Recent months have seen rising tensions over the seemingly insurmountable demands for collateral prompted by tough new financial regulation. With US Treasury estimates ranging as high as to $11.2 trillion in stressed market conditions, some observers are deeply concerned that the industry could be in danger of sliding into a black hole
The Royal Bank of Scotland has appointed former FSA supervisor Jon Pain as head of its conduct and regulatory affairs division, reporting directly to chief executive Stephen Hester.
Financial technology company SunGard has released a new tool designed to help banks and other financial institutions to streamline their compliance with regulation, reduce their costs and control risk.
The funds industry is going through a time of great change, with a combination of regulation, cost pressure, consolidation and globalisation forcing many participants to take a close look at their business and operating models and consider what their future role in the ecosystem should be. For some, this means outsourcing activities, creating opportunities for […]
With the newly formed LEI Foundation moving forward with establishing processes for issuing and managing the Legal Entity Identifier through its Regulatory Oversight Committee and the registration of seven pre-Local Operating Units, it is worth taking a step back to understand exactly why the industry is pushing forward with the LEI and what it could achieve.
The cost to fully upgrade the financial industry’s infrastructure to make efficient use of collateral will reach $53 billion, according to new research by Celent – but too much standardisation could do more harm than good, warns SIX Securities Services.
It’s not proving easy, but progress is being made on the road to the development of a global Legal Entity Identifier that works and makes business sense.
A difficult future for the banking industry, but a potentially great one for London as a financial centre, was predicted by Sir John Gieve, chairman of VocaLink and former deputy governor of the Bank of England, speaking at the opening of Swift’s Business Forum in London today. But the industry must be careful and diplomatic if it wants to have any real say in how the future is shaped.
Dermot Turing, partner at Clifford Chance, told the IPS conference that regulators are hampering innovation by making it hard for the industry to collaborate though application of competition law. He advocates that banks – particularly from the transaction and payments world – should be educating the regulators in order to get better regulations.
Standard Chartered has enlisted Clearstream and Euroclear to make more efficient use of collateral, as tough new financial regulations drive investor fears of an impending collateral shortfall.
Despite its negative public perception, high-frequency trading can act as a force for good in capital markets by adding efficiencies that help investors get a better deal – but only if it is properly regulated, according to new research by technology consultancy GreySpark Partners.
The absence of market surveillance tools in many jurisdictions and regions is “potentially one of the more significant problems facing the markets in light of technological developments, such as the rapid speed of trade execution and increase in order volume”, says the International Organization Of Securities Commissions in its final report on surveillance.
Market operators have a duty to educate the public about stock markets – and to take widespread concerns about the role of high-frequency traders seriously, according to Christian Katz, chief executive at SIX Swiss Exchange.
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.
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.
Post-trade services company Traiana has opened its Swap Data Repository Service, Harmony TR Connect, for OTC derivatives – providing a tool for market participants to comply with US Dodd-Frank legislation on trade reporting.
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.
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 […]
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 […]
Download daily International Payment Summit 2013 reports from KPMG
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 […]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
