LME overhauls network architecture
The London Metal Exchange is working with Colt to launch a new dedicated network interconnecting all its systems including the LME Clear clearing service.
The London Metal Exchange is working with Colt to launch a new dedicated network interconnecting all its systems including the LME Clear clearing service.
Entries for the Banking Technology Awards 2014 have been open for a while now, but as we move into the last few weeks, this is always a time when we are flooded with questions about the process. By way of response, here are some guidelines based on my experience chairing the judging panel over the past 11 years.
The European Commission wants to bring down the barriers to cloud computing in a move that promises to revolutionise the way transaction banks can serve clients.
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.
Milan-based payment processing specialist SIA says that a migration of its systems to the Red Hat Linux environment has led to a 270% reduction in processing times.
Unlike manufacturing companies, which run their operations on a single predominant ERP system supported by a few auxiliary solutions, banks have added layer upon layer of technology, ending up with an unmanageable snarl of systems and applications. Just to put things in perspective, it is estimated that on average global banks have more than 5,000 applications.
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 …
Setting up a bank in the UK is costly, time-consuming, heavily regulated and not easy. As a result, the dynamic, start-up culture that drives innovation in many other sectors is less prevalent within banking and financial services.
The rise of new technologies is drastically redefining both the responsibilities of chief financial officers and the way they work, providing the ability tomake better organisational decisions with faster, accurate and more reliable data.
Analyst firm Juniper Research reckons more people will be using mobile apps for banking than web-based options by 2019, as the 800 million people who used their phones for banking more than doubles to 1.75 billion in five years.
Banks are continuing to spend money on branches, but they are dramatically changing their role to become centres for sale-oriented advice rather than service-oriented transactions, driven by the rapid growth of digital banking.
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
Australian broker Macquarie Futures has begun using a cloud-based reconciliation service from Gresham Computing and Amazon Web Services, which the broker says will help it to make its North American derivatives business more efficient.
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.
A lesson learned from the global financial crises was how critical free cash flow can be for corporates, their customers, and their suppliers. As businesses seek to unlock cash flow from day-to-day operations, savvy treasurers have discovered vendor payments as a means to extend payment terms while improving vendor health, writes Chris Bozek, Managing Director, Head of Global Trade and Supply Chain Products Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
Banks need to do more to educate consumers about the ways in which they may be exposing themselves to fraud risks, according to a new report by Aite Group using data from ACI Worldwide, which notes that one in four consumers has been victimised by card fraud in the past five years.
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.
Combining development and operational deployment of software into a more integrated cycle can greatly improve time to market and improve efficiencies giving “10 times faster software driven innovation”, delegates at the annual SifmaTech trading systems conference and exhibition in New York were told.
The Euro Banking Association has published results of research and assessment work on supply chain finance topics and alternative electronic payments, including recommendations on managing financial industry collaboration and partnerships.
Banks are paying lip-service to the concept of customer service and are years behind on innovation – and unless they literally get their act together by collaboratively embracing open software libraries and sharing applications and data, they will not survive.
With the US markets heading in the same direction as Europe and elsewhere, the world is converging on T+2 settlement, albeit at different speeds.
Reporting on the management of intraday liquidity risk will start on a monthly basis from 1 January 2015 to coincide with the implementation of the liquidity coverage ratio reporting requirements. Christian Goerlach of Deutsche Bank, takes a closer look at some of the issues facing global banks.
An question that continues to be asked is will the increased adoption of ISO 20022 facilitate the consolidation of payments clearing utilities and see the introduction of new services for customers? This suggests that despite the fact that ISO 20022 has been around for more than decade, confusion still exists over what it is.
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.
Across the financial services sector, the question is now less about where cloud technology is being used, and more about where it isn’t used. Where do financial institutions draw the line when it comes to deciding whether to keep a process or IT-related service in-house or outsource it to specialists such as Amazon Web Services, SAP and many others?
The speed at which the mobile market evolves is staggering. Just as we started to look at mobile first, where banks need to align their services and strategies to cater for mobile before desktop or other traditional channels, the notion of mobile-only is now creeping to the fore.
Given that bank customers are unlikely to increase significantly their usage of ATMs and now that opportunities to deploy large numbers of additional dispensers are limited, what does the future hold for the ATM and where does its next phase of growth lie?
Looked at from a data perspective, many new regulations have overlapping requirements that come back to customer data. Banking Technology joined forces with Markit | Genpact KYC Services and regulatory specialist JWG and recently conducted a survey to look at how firms are approaching the challenges this poses, the survey proved hugely popular with over 200 responses.
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.
For the banking sector, which by definition at least is as much economic activity as it is social utility, the relevance of gamification is no longer debatable. Yet recent research shows that just 9% of banks globally have made forays into gamification
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.
BIAN – the Bank Industry Architecture Network – has made further progress in its efforts to promote banking system standards internationally with the US First Niagara Bank and Computer Sciences Corporation and Japan’s Nomura joining as members.
Core banking system replacement projects are notoriously difficult and disaster-prone, but successful legacy migration and systems modernisation can be shown to improve profitability, at least for smaller banks.