Asset management firm Blackrock is trialling Symphony’s new financial messaging app. The app is being tested by part of Blackrock’s workforce and it is “looking to roll it out more widely in the coming months”. Blackrock is a major name to come onboard and the firm has 13,000 employees. However, Symphony has had success before […]
Marstone, a New York-based financial services firm, has teamed up with IBM Watson for Wealth Management to offer digital advice assisted by cognitive computing. The plan is for Marstone’s platform, powered by Watson, to use data, patterns and natural language to provide cognitive advice and learn from experience. Margaret Hartigan, chief executive of Marstone, says […]
It was a sense of déjà vu at TSAM (The Summit for Asset Management) 2016 in London yesterday (15 March), as the industry still says it is facing a “tsunami of regulation”. The event brought around 300 delegates, vendors and speakers to London’s Lancaster Hotel. All there to network, and discuss trends and issues in […]
Texas-based asset administrator, Virtus Partners, has gone live with new back office lending system, FusionBanking LoanIQ, supplied by Misys. The new platform supports full-service agency administration and bank portfolio loan administration. It covers SME, commercial and syndicated lending. The contract was signed in November last year. The implementation work took around three months and came […]
Fiserv has added new advisor portfolio management and trading technology to its Unified Wealth Platform. The single platform is used for portfolio management, trading, accounting and reporting for managed accounts. The company says over 5,000 advisors and users supporting rep as portfolio manager (RPM) or rep as advisor (RPA) programmes have migrated to the “enhanced” […]
London-based Calastone, the global funds transaction network, has launched Data Services, a market intelligence solution for fund managers. Calastone says that MiFID II, the European regulatory framework designed to “improve the transparency and oversight of financial markets”, is moving responsibility to understand the distribution chain from distributors and platform providers to fund managers. Rob Swan, […]
Trading platform provider Fidessa has reported a growth in revenue in 2015 up 7%, rising to £295.5 million up from £275 million in 2014, despite the reduction and closure of many sell-side trading operations over the last 12 months. The firm notes that the closure of the Jefferies Group’s Bache futures unit and Standard Chartered […]
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 […]
Markit has acquired systems integration software developed by JP Morgan. The provider of financial information services will make the software available to buy- and sell-side institutions seeking to integrate with major systems used in the syndicated loan market, including agent servicing platforms and Markit’s trade settlement services. Facilitating systems integration is an important step toward […]
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 […]
Fixed income market operator Tradeweb has launched an electronic over-the-counter (OTC) marketplace for US-listed exchange traded funds (ETFs). The firm says the platform tackles some of the challenges inherent in institutional OTC trading such as pre-trade price transparency, operational efficiency and access to institutional-size liquidity. Tradeweb clients will be able to use the platform to […]
On 12 January new EU regulations on securities financing will take effect. Local regulators including France’s AMF have warned financial institutions to be ready for the new rules, which require greater transparency.
An “Implementation Playbook” detailing the timeline, milestones and dependencies involved in migrating the US equities, fixed income and unit trust markets to a two-day settlement cycle has been published by the T+2 Industry Steering Committee.
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.
A new online market for buying and selling financial research has gone live in Europe. Focused on providing buy-side firms with more transparency, the new RSRCHXexchange is based in the cloud and is aimed at helping institutions comply with MiFID II research unbundling requirements.
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.
South Africa’s Johannesburg Stock Exchange is moving its derivatives and fixed income markets onto Millennium Exchange, the trading platform it bought from the London Stock Exchange when it moved its equities market earlier this year.
Technology is equipping non-bank market-makers to move into the US Treasury Market, giving them analytics and speed to manage and hedge risk, while enhancing market liquidity. “Market makers have been deploying electronic tools at varying degrees over the past decade,” says Anthony Perrotta, a principal and head of fixed income research at Tabb Group, author […]
BBVA Group has entered a multi-year agreement with Broadridge Financial Solutions) for a post-trade managed service to support its institutional fixed income business in the US. Under the agreement, Broadridge will provide an integrated managed service to support fixed income and repurchase agreement processing, international clearance and settlement and investor communications services
The funds industry has successfully implemented the requirements of the Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive over the past year but has doubts about the use of data being gathered by regulators and question whether it is helping regulators to better spot threats and systemic risks that may impact market stability.
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
MCO Europe, exclusive distributor of the McObject high performance database financial markets in the UK and Europe, is raising investment through Crowdcube, the UK’s largest crowdfunding site, to fund growth and expansion. McObject’s eXtremeDB Financial Edition high-performance database is used for trading and risk management by banks, fund managers, brokers and data vendors.
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.
A new US bond trading venue with a mission to help electronify fixed income markets for investors using experience gained in the equity markets is preparing to launch in the US this quarter. Called OpenBondX, the venue was Created by former Lime Brokerage chief executive Alistair Brown and former colleagues, OpenBondX is an ‘all to all’ system open to the buy-side and the sell-side.
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.
Fixed income markets have historically been a bastion of high-touch trading, with manual processes, large tickets and little standardisation. But as recent years have seen inventory slashed and balance sheets cut in face of rising regulatory pressure, finding liquidity has become more of a challenge. A group of banks are hoping to reinvigorate the market though a standardised messaging system.
Continuing its policy of offering products that fit across user workflows, Bloomberg has moved in to the transaction reporting space in Europe. The company’s Trade Order Management System has been granted approval by the Financial Conduct Authority to report securities with an ISIN and OTC derivatives as part of the UK’s Approved Reporting Mechanisms regime.
The Financial Conduct Authority plans to conduct a market study of the investment and corporate banking sector to decide if competition in the sector is working properly. It may also look into the asset management later in the year.
The cyber-attack on Sony Pictures at the end of last year highlighted something that IT and security people in financial services have known for some time – the modern networked environment is far less secure than most people are prepared to admit …
SmartStream Technologies has acquired the assets of IBM’s Algorithmics Collateral solution and will add it to its existing solutions for the automation of the end-to-end post trade lifecycle, rebranding it as TLM Collateral Management. The system provides collateral lifecycle automation for buy- and sell-side institutions, custodians and asset servicers, large and small.
SIX Swiss Exchange is to launch a new trading platform for corporate bonds, which it says will provide a better way of trading large blocks of less liquid issues. The new platform is due to launch in the first half of 2015.
ICAP is combining its EBS foreign exchange and BrokerTec fixed income electronic trading platforms into one business unit. The change is“an internal management reorganisation” and the platforms will remain separate for the foreseeable future.
Fund managers are showing a “significantly more positive attitude” to the imminent Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive. Initial fears appear to have subsided, the challenges and predicted costs have significantly reduced and the industry is realising the opportunities.
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.
The outsourcing of middle and back office functions by banks and brokers is now the norm, with nearly all firms outsourcing at least part of their functions to specialist providers such as custodian banks.
Could the establishment of an enhanced outsourcing oversight capability do more for asset managers than simply satisfy the FCA? A more mature set of oversight metrics could be used to provide foresight into how the outsourcer might perform in the future.
The complexity of regulatory reforms in Europe and the US are placing pressure on the industry and may catch some participants unawares.
Broadridge Financial Solutions has formed an alliance with UK software developer Lombard Risk Management under which Lombard’s collateral management system will be integrated into Broadridge’s applications and infrastructure services.
Following the tumultuous change that came in the wake of the subprime crisis, capital markets firms have yet to regain a strong foothold but 2014 is showing increasing evidence of a shift to a higher gear.
Enlightened buy-side firms are facing the challenges of high-touch regulation, fragmented liquidity and ongoing cost pressures head on and developing new business models and approaches at every stage of their workflow.
