Europe’s trade repositories have reported a largely smooth transition, following the deadline under EMIR on 12 February – but behind the scenes deep questions remain about the viability of the European Commission’s ambitious derivatives reform.
Revelations that Barclays customer data was being sold on the black market to corrupt City traders have caused the bank some embarrassment over the weekend– but the incident raises more questions than it answers, according to observers.
The Dodd-Frank Act launched the acronym SEF into the alphabet soup of modern capital markets, After three years of repeated discussions, consultations, submissions and furious wrangling, Swap Execution Facilities finally come into operation this week.
In the wake of scandals involving manipulation of market indices, can statistical learning theory be used to detect and fix anomalies in Libor and other market indices?
A week before the final reporting deadline for the European Commission’s EMIR regulation, tech firms are making a last push to get OTC trade reporting up and running.
Switzerland’s SIX Financial Information has begun delivering FATCA tax information to the US Inland Revenue Service, ahead of the controversial extraterritorial tax’s reporting deadline in July.
Transaction cost analysis has become a staple feature of equities trading since 2007’s watershed piece of European legislation MiFID. But that’s just the beginning of a journey that is increasingly coming to transform the way FX and fixed income asset classes are traded, according to Michael Sparkes, director of analytical products and research at broker ITG.
As Moscow modernises its corporate governance, legal institutions and financial infrastructure, new possibilities are opening up to foreign investors, says Tim Bevan, executive board member at BCS.
The Basel principles for effective risk management offer a chance to transform information management that should not be missed.
The International Swaps and Derivatives Association has set a date for the first stage of sweeping changes to the ISDAFIX benchmark for annual swap rates, as part of a major global push to clean up rates and make them more accountable.
Post-trade services company Traiana plans to connect to four trade repositories in preparation for the European Commission’s EMIR legislation, which requires trade reporting and clearing of OTC derivatives.
Senior transaction banking executives have called for a political discussion to resolve the issue of emerging market access to banking services caused by the reduction of the correspondent banking services network.
Regulation is driving a structural shift away from capital markets and investment banking towards transaction banking – but even this hint of opportunity could be under threat, according to senior financial services panellists speaking at the BAFT IFSA conference in London this week.
Major global banks need to grasp social networks, cloud computing, user-generated content, personalisation, contextual information and gamification if they are to maintain a competitive edge and stay connected with customers. But they also need to ensure their innovations are transmitted thoroughly to all employees, according to panellists at the BAFT IFSA conference in London on Monday.
The European Central Bank has released statistics that it says show that migration to the Single Euro Payments Area “gathered pace strongly” in December and urged market participants not to relax in their migration efforts. Earlier this month the European Commission announced a six-month extension past the 1 February deadline by which time all payments […]
The financial services sector may be heavily regulated, but it is poorly standardised. A British Standards Institute-led initiative to drive more adoption of voluntary standards could reap considerable benefits for the industry.
The rising cost of KYC at global banks is threatening to disconnect smaller regional banks and even entire countries, according to Joachim von Hänisch, head of Swiss start-up company KYC Exchange, which plans to launch next Wednesday.
Tuesday’s landmark deal between the European Parliament, Council and Commission on MiFID II will hurt long-term investors and may paint the regulator into a corner, according to Juan Pablo Urrutia, European general council at broker ITG.
Reforms to the way derivatives trade in the US and Europe are causing a conflict between consumer desire for bespoke solutions and regulatory attempts at standardisation – and the self-inflicted panic as the deadline approaches indicates the cost may be too high, according to a panel of senior capital markets representatives speaking at an event organised by the Futures and Options Association in London on Tuesday.
Dutch bank ABN Amro has become a member of German derivatives exchange Eurex’s OTC Clear service, which clears interest rate swaps, as part of the bank’s compliance with EMIR.
Most banks are still not ready for the arrival of Swap Execution Facilities, the new category of trading venues created by the Dodd-Frank act in the US to handle OTC derivatives. Worse still, market participants are almost universally negative about SEFs, according to a new paper by research house GreySpark Partners.
Swift has created a dedicated Financial Compliance Services unit to manage a growing number of service offerings. The new unit will focus initially on the development of a Know Your Customer Registry planned for launch later this year as well as the integration and development of existing services.
Barclays has been fined $3.75 million by the US Financial Industry Regulatory Authority for its failure to keep electronic records, including emails and instant messages, which are required by law. The failure is the latest in a string of recent fines for the bank.
Five international banks are to become direct participants in the UK’s CHAPS high-value payments system as part of the Bank of England’s efforts to reduce systemic risk.
With regulators agreeing that “higher expectations” must be met by G-SIFIs for risk data aggregation and reporting by 2016, firms are now under huge pressure to provide data strategies and implementation plans and end denial about any shortcomings.
The International Organisation of Securities Commissions has set out its final recommendations on the integrity and efficiency of markets, calling for regulators to think deeply about the effects of their regulation and keep monitoring the markets regularly to ensure that changes are taken into account.
Electronic fixed income trading, one of the last major asset classes traded by humans, could take a big step forward when a new Nasdaq OMX dark pool trading venue goes live next year.
IntercontinentalExchange has revealed further details of its plans for Liffe, following its acquisition of NYSE Euronext in November.
Germany’s Commerzbank has just signed up to Regis-TR, the European trade repository owned by German CSD Clearstream and Spanish CSD Iberclear, as part of the bank’s drive to ready itself for the EMIR legislation on OTC derivatives reporting.
With new arrivals from big names including FATCA, MiFID, Dodd-Frank and the AIFMD, 2014 is set to be another eventful year in the regulatory space. So what are our Top 10 predictions?
Bitcoin is more traceable but less regulated, less expensive but more volatile, and more decentralised but less accountable, than a regular currency. Feeling confused? That’s not the half of it, according to Ernst & Young.
With no fewer than 70,000 pages of regulation, and some record fines, 2013 will be a year to remember (or possibly to forget) for many financial services professionals
Basel III has transformed liquidity risk management departments into glorified regulatory functions, according to a new report by analyst firm Celent. As if this good news was not enough to be getting on with, the research house also inevitably concludes that banks will have to change their risk data, models, appetite, organisational and analytics frameworks too.
The data management aspects of compliance can run into tens of thousands of man-hours per institution, each year. Firms have to adapt and find new techniques to manage this increasing burden.
Wrapping up all of the reference data a large global bank needs and making sure it is standardised, automated and ready for the regulator is a big task. Japanese bank Mizuho International has just installed an EDM service from vendor Golden Source, which it says will help to support trading and satisfy the regulator.
Financial crime specialist Fiserv has just launched its Financial Crime Risk Management platform, which aims to help financial institutions to ward off financial crime and slash their risk.
Sapient Global Markets has launched a close of business reporting service that it says will help capital and commodity markets trading firms to meet regulation at lower cost.
Former SunGard chief executive Cris Conde writes about the importance of training in firms’ governance, risk management and compliance strategies and why they should treat it as an investment.
BNY Mellon has added a link to Bloomberg to its AccessEdge investment management service, which the bank says will help clients to better manage their collateral.
As Europe’s post-trade infrastructure is subjected to increasing levels of regulation, CSDs will be forced to change their business models to stay alive, custodians will be forced to seek alliances to find economies of scale, and brokers will have to outsource parts of their mid and back office processes to stay in the game, according to analyst firm Celent.
