Securities Industry News articles from December 2006

Securities Industry News archives from December 2006

Mergers, Acquisitions and Outsourcing.
December 4, 2006... Corporations and private equity firms are discovering a new weapon in their quest to gain greater value from mergers and acquisitions (M&A)--outsourcing. Acquirers are just beginning to recognize how outsourcing can help them to realize...

A Pre-Merger Take on Modernized Self-Regulation.
December 4, 2006... On Nov. 28, NYSE Group and the National Association of Securities Dealers announced an agreement to combine their member-regulation operations. Judging by recent comments by some of the principal players--such as NASD chairman and CEO Mary L....

TheMarkets.com Upgrades Research Delivery Platform.
December 4, 2006... New York-based TheMarkets.com, a securities industry joint venture that has established itself as a common online platform for delivering research and earnings estimates to the buy side, has released an upgrade of its flagship product to...

BNY Jaywalk Introduces Technology-Enhanced Research Service.
December 4, 2006... BNY Jaywalk, the independent research aggregator that is part of Bank of New York Co. spin-off BNY ConvergEx Group, last week unveiled Jaywalk 360, a customized, technology-aided analytical service for institutional investors. Two months...

Investment Bankers Targeted by Mobility Vendors.(Pyxis Mobile )(Vaultus Mobile Technologies)
December 4, 2006... Two providers of mobile-device software for financial industry applications, Pyxis Mobile and Vaultus Mobile Technologies, have come out with products that keep on-the-run investment bankers in touch with their office systems via BlackBerrys....

Swift Payment Standards Group May Go Its Own Way.(Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication)
December 4, 2006... Two years after a joint body known as the International Standards Harmonization Team (ISTH) released its extensible markup language (XML) payment kernel, the Swift messaging cooperative says that it has formed a group of member banks to work on...

BT Radianz Partners With Mexican Derivatives Market: Shared telecom infrastructure also supports data distribution by Taiwan exchange.
December 4, 2006... Global financial networking company BT Radianz announced last week that its shared infrastructure will be used by the Mexican Derivatives Exchange (MexDer) to enable access by foreign participants to its trading applications and market data...

OptionsXpress Introduces 24-Hour Futures Trading.(optionsXpress Holdings )
December 4, 2006... Online brokerage optionsXpress Holdings has announced the availability of 24-hour trading for a wide range of electronically traded futures contracts, including many of the most popular financial, interest-rate, currency, metals, energy and...

Chinese Brokerages Mandated to Use Custodians: Third-party requirement hailed as milestone in securities risk mitigation.
December 4, 2006... Chinese brokerages will have to use third-party custodians by next summer, according to Xinyi Zhuang, vice chairman of the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC). Firms that fail to comply could lose their licenses or find themselves...

China Bars Foreign Brokerage Investments at Least Until Summer.
December 4, 2006... The National Development and Reform Commission issued a statement Nov. 11 promising to reopen China's securities sector to foreign joint ventures sometime before 2010. Currently, foreign brokers are prohibited from investing in Chinese...

Lloyds Trading Floor Deploys New HP Blade Workstation.(Lloyds TSB Group PLC)(Hewlett-Packard Co.)
December 4, 2006... Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) last week unveiled what it bills as the first "workstation-class performance" on a blade computing architecture with reliability and control equal to that of a conventional data center operation. The technology is...

ISE's New Markets.(International Securities Exchange)(ISE Stock Exchange)
December 4, 2006... In four days, the equities offshoot of the International Securities Exchange, ISE Stock Exchange, will shift into high gear with the launch of its fully displayed market that will be integrated with the MidPoint Match system that opened on...

Freeze at the SEC.(Securities and Exchange Commission's staff recruitment )(Brief article)
December 4, 2006... Is the Securities and Exchange Commission understaffed just as its workload is reaching a fever pitch? Budget problems forced the agency to implement a hiring freeze during its 2005 fiscal year. The freeze was lifted at the end of fiscal 2006...

Thain in China.
December 4, 2006... NYSE Group chief executive John Thain used a visit to China last week to underline his optimism about the pending NYSE-Euronext merger, which he put in the context of an exchange-globalization movement that "will reach Asia next." "I...

Fidelity Embeds Aggregation in Broker Network: Upscale data tool gets broader distribution.(Fidelity Investments' National Financial clearing unit )
December 4, 2006... Overcoming cost and technical hurdles that have vexed financial services technologists for several years, Fidelity Investments' National Financial clearing unit recently began incorporating account aggregation--the ability to view all of a...

The E-discovery Awakening: New federal rules hit securities industry hard.(Federal Rules of Civil Procedure)(usage of email as an evidence)
December 4, 2006... New Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) that took effect on Friday will change the way companies do business in federal courts. Based on a U.S. Supreme Court ruling of April 12, the rule changes are part of a package aimed at defining what...

SRO Consolidation Gets Wide Support; Questions Linger Over Some Details.(self-regulatory organization )
December 4, 2006... The years-long campaign by Wall Street's largest firms to eliminate redundant costs by creating a single self-regulatory organization (SRO) came to fruition last week when the National Association of Securities Dealers and NYSE Group signed a...

Swift Data Dispute Simmers: Contacts with critical EU panel limited.
December 4, 2006... The seeds for the discord surrounding the revelation earlier this year that the Swift network was complying with U.S. Treasury Department subpoenas for customer and transactional data were sown 11 years ago in the form of a European Union...

FinCEN Door Revolves Again: 4th Director Search in 3 Years.(Financial Crimes Enforcement Network )
December 4, 2006... When Robert Werner announced his resignation Nov. 21 from the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), the Treasury Department agency responsible for enforcing the Bank Secrecy Act and related anti-money-laundering (AML) provisions began...

IFMG Adopts Second Clearer to Attract New Business.(Independent Financial Marketing Group's agreement with Pershing Ltd.)
December 4, 2006... Looking to attract new customers onto its platform, Independent Financial Marketing Group (IFMG) has adopted a second clearing firm, following a major technology overhaul to ease the task of supporting two clearing relationships. The...

Algo Arms Race Has a Leader--for Now.(algorithmic trading)(Credit Suisse Group)(Company overview)
December 18, 2006... As algorithmic trading, particularly by hedge funds and advanced proprietary desks, has grown significantly--Boston-based research firm Aite Group says that it will account for a third of all shares traded in the U.S. this year and for more...

DTCC Sets Plan for Equity Derivatives, Links With CLS Bank For CDS Payments.(Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. )
December 18, 2006... Deepening its already critical involvement in the securities industry's efforts to overcome difficult derivatives processing challenges, Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. (DTCC) announced major initiatives last week to expand its equity...

Australia Flourishing as Processing Hub.
December 18, 2006... With the world's fourth-largest pool of managed investment assets and the largest capital market in its region outside of Japan, Australia's financial services sector has taken on a more cosmopolitan cast in recent years as growing numbers of...

Portfolio Margining Approved by SEC.(Securities and Exchange Commission )
December 18, 2006... The Securities and Exchange Commission has approved much-anticipated changes to portfolio margining accounts, enabling investors to employ significantly more leverage while placing greater responsibility on broker-dealers to control the risk....

TransactTools CEO: Independence Preserved Under NYSE.
December 18, 2006... In the few days since the Dec. 12 announcement of NYSE Group's acquisition of trading connectivity vendor TransactTools, the message was that there will be minimal changes affecting the target firm--except that NYSE will further consolidate its...

Money Back.(discounts offered by stock exchanges)(Brief article)
December 18, 2006... Aside from its robust operating profits, the international securities industry is racking up hundreds of millions of dollars and euros in rebates and discounts thanks to scale economies and efficiencies at industry utilities. Swift, the La...

Sifma's Thumbs-Up.(Securities Industry & Financial Markets Association's endorsement of new securities law)(Brief article)
December 18, 2006... The Securities Industry & Financial Markets Association (Sifma) small-firms committee on Dec. 12 announced its endorsement of the proposed consolidation of broker-dealer self-regulatory operations of the National Association of Securities...

No Reprieve.(hedge fund regulations)(Brief article)
December 18, 2006... A court ruling in June relieved U.S. hedge funds from the burden of mandatory registration with the Securities and Exchange Commission, but the year ahead may bring more regulatory oversight to the alternative investment industry than ever...

Cusip Alerts Live.(Standard & Poor's Corp.'s messaging services)(Brief article)
December 18, 2006... Cusip Now alerts, which the Standard & Poor's (S&P) Cusip Service Bureau announced in October (Securities Industry News, Oct. 30), were activated on schedule this month. The bureau, which administers the nine-character security and issuer...

E-archiving: What You Don't Know Can Hurt You.
December 18, 2006... The ancient Greeks used the legend of Pandora to explain how evil entered the world, while we in the 21st century view bad things as a simple fact of life, an inescapable facet of human nature. "To err is human," we say, unable to conceive of a...

ECSDA Offers Guidelines for Post-Trade Interoperability.(European Central Securities Depositories Association)
December 18, 2006... The European Central Securities Depositories Association (ECSDA) has come up with a nuts-and-bolts manual for how depositories and clearinghouses can interoperate to achieve more efficient post-trade processing of cross-border transactions...

Consolidation Trumps Interoperability Attempts: Accenture.
December 18, 2006... Interoperability standards are a realistic--but less than optimal--solution to the incompatibilities of European clearing and settlement infrastructures, according to a study by international consulting firm Accenture. Consolidation of...

Spending on Counterparty Data Management Skyrocketing.
December 18, 2006... Spurred by regulatory requirements, spending on third-party solutions for managing legal entity data--often called counterparty data--will burgeon from $16 million in 2006 to a whopping $253 million by 2010, according to a report by Aite Group....

Algos, Hedge Funds Push Bond Trading Into New Territory.(Algorithmic )(Conference news)
December 18, 2006... Algorithmic and automated, or black box, forms of trading, fueled in large part by aggressive hedge funds and sell-side firms scrambling to stay ahead of the technology curve, are increasingly spreading into non-equity products as the...

Treading Lightly Into the Bond-Trading Fray.(LiquidityHub)(Company overview)
December 18, 2006... The crowded field of fixed-income trading platforms has a new entrant, London-based consortium LiquidityHub, that is framing its strategy in the most benign of terms. Statements from the firm and its recently named CEO, former Morgan Stanley...

Hedge Fund Trends Push Institutional Changes: DTCC, Nasdaq considering speed and access enhancements.(Depository Trust & Clearing Corp.)(The Nasdaq Stock Market Inc.)(Conference news)
December 18, 2006... Hedge funds' influence over changes in the operations and technology of institutional services was reflected in two initiatives that came to light during the recent Securities Industry & Financial Markets Association's (Sifma) Operations Update...

MidPoint Match Is Instinet's Ninth Algo Destination.(International Securities Exchange Stock Exchange MidPoint Match)(Instinet Group Inc.'s alliances to offer access to multiple trading platforms through a single interface )
December 18, 2006... The ISE Stock Exchange MidPoint Match is the latest destination for New York-based agency brokerage Instinet's Nighthawk liquidity aggregation algorithm. The first offering of the International Securities Exchange's new equity market, MidPoint...

Boston's New and Maturing Options Market: With tech upgrade and strong backing, BOX looks to penny pilot and beyond.(Boston Options Exchange- Scott Morris)(Interview)
December 18, 2006... The Boston Options Exchange (BOX) is easily lumped in with the current wave of highly automated exchanges and alternative trading venues that are upending the established market-structure order, but its parent company, Boston Options Exchange...