Securities Industry News articles from February 2008

Securities Industry News archives from February 2008

Regulators Reach Out to NYSE; Credit Derivatives Transparency Project Possible~Participants say solution should come from private market.
February 4, 2008... Concerns about pricing and payment failures in the multi-trillion-dollar credit derivatives sector have led the Securities and Exchange Commission and Treasury Department to consider having exchanges post quotes and trades of collateralized...

Pandemic Exercise A Qualified Success ~Study shows strains from absenteeism, telecommuters.
February 4, 2008... The Treasury Department has released the results of a pandemic testing exercise for the U.S. financial services industry. While Treasury called the test, which ran from Sept. 24 to Oct. 11, "both an unprecedented event and a success on many...

Broker-Dealers Facing Data Storage Dilemma~Reg NMS, MiFID best-execution requirements demand new techniques.
February 4, 2008... New regulations on both sides of the Atlantic are mandating that broker-dealers provide their clients with best execution, and have the records to prove it. Now venders of storage solutions are rushing to answer a pair of questions: How will...

Merged Eurex, ISE Name Their First Joint Initiative: A New U.S. Options Platform~ Due in 2011, homegrown system will replace OMX's.
February 4, 2008... The International Securities Exchange (ISE) and Eurex, fresh off the December completion of their merger, said they are jointly developing an options trading system that will bolster ISE in an increasingly competitive U.S. market. Until...

Hedge Funds Take On Distressed Debt, Side Pockets Swell.
February 4, 2008... Hedge funds are likely to play an important part in solving the subprime mortgage crisis, according to Securities and Exchange Commission commissioner Paul Atkins. And despite some well-publicized subprime-related hedge fund collapses, the...

Risk Management, E-trading Top 2008 Trends.
February 4, 2008... In a recent report, Boston-based research firm Aite Group cited the ongoing fallout from the subprime crisis, the continued expansion of electronic trading beyond equities, and market fragmentation in Europe and Asia as some of the trends it...

Euroclear Expands in Asia.
February 4, 2008... Expanding its reach in the Asia-Pacific region, international depository Euroclear Bank is upgrading its representative office in Hong Kong to a branch office, increasing its operations staff from 20 to 45 and transferring several senior-level...

Fidessa Partners Pipeline.
February 4, 2008... London-based Fidessa LatentZero announced that it is enabling traders to send orders directly to dark book Pipeline Trading Systems via its Minerva order management system, with "single-click efficiency." Fidessa said that the partnership with...

IPC Enhances IP Network.
February 4, 2008... Trading communications provider IPC Systems is expanding its EVS, or Enterprise Voice Services, suite with the introduction of EVS Media Service, which includes support for call bridging and trader mobility. The new product, expected to...

Resolving the Corporate Actions Quagmire.
February 4, 2008... It's a dirty business, but someone has to do it. Such has been the attitude taken by the financial community when it comes to processing corporate actions. Firms have been willing to spend millions of dollars on cross-asset-class trading...

ISO 20022 Migration Won't Include a Quick FIX ~Swift plans to finish by 2010; FPL offers up an alternative framework.(FIX Protocol Ltd.)(International Organization for Standardization)
February 4, 2008... Swift is proceeding with its migration from the International Organization for Standardization's (ISO) 15022 payment messaging format to ISO 20022--scheduled for completion by 2010--but questions remain. Some ISO 20022, or MX, messages don't...

Apama's Accelerator Speeds Up Algorithm Creation.
February 4, 2008... Progress Software Corp.'s Apama division has enhanced its event processing platform to speed the development of order-routing strategies while helping clients meet the best-execution demands of the European Union's Markets in Financial...

BNY ConvergEx Launches DMA Order Types.
February 4, 2008... Agency brokerage BNY ConvergEx Group has released a suite of direct-market access (DMA) order types that provide traders with displayed and dark liquidity simultaneously. The suite, dubbed TactEx, is designed to increase execution opportunities...

Interoperability: A Two-Edged Sword~Functionality advantages come with security dangers from public networks.
February 4, 2008... Technology vendors are bringing down the barriers between instant messaging (IM) networks, making it easier for traders to send messages to counterparties on other platforms. But such interoperability also brings security risks, opening the...

Pivot at Center of IM Trading Boom ~Wall Street demanding collaborative, industry-specific communications tools.
February 4, 2008... Pivot, developer of the IMTrader platform, saw its customer base triple last year, according to Ed McDonnell, SVP of sales at the Boston- and New York-based company. And while Pivot's sales team doubled, McDonnell says the expanded staff isn't...

The Web 2.0 Threat~ Leading-edge collaborative tools and interactive sites pose monitoring burden.
February 4, 2008... As the Web 2.0 movement makes interactive applications and social networks such as Facebook ubiquitous on employees' desktop computers, financial firms are facing the daunting task of monitoring these so-called greynets. Instant messaging...

An Archiving Call for BlackBerry Texting: Don't ban SMS or PIN-to-PIN messages, say vendors--we can store them.
February 4, 2008... Text messaging, or texting, may be spreading like wildfire, but many securities firms have long banned its use for business-related purposes--this despite the fact that regulators have only recently said that archiving of such messages is...

DOJ: Futures Structure Anti-competitive'~CME, Nymex say vertical clearing key to global competitiveness.
February 11, 2008... The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) last week called the vertical structure of U.S. futures exchanges anti-competitive and costly for investors. Though the statement is unlikely to result in imminent regulatory changes, it highlights the...

Rainbow Rises in Europe: Derivatives Get New Platform.
February 11, 2008... The latest in a series of trading venues started by groups of often overlapping global financial institutions, a new European platform could address fungibility issues in the listed derivatives market and ultimately reduce costs for investors....

Labor Shifts Fee-Disclosure Burden~Good news for plan sponsors; new demands on fund companies.
February 11, 2008... In a pair of interrelated rulings affecting pension plans under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (Erisa) of 1974, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) appears to have reduced some of the administrative burdens of pension plan sponsors,...

Indian Outsourcing Prime for Consolidation~Experts see a run on specialists, as big vendors get bigger.
February 11, 2008... At least once a month, neoIT, an outsourcing consultancy in San Ramon, Calif., gets an unsolicited message from a newly minted business process outsourcing (BPO) entity in India seeking clients. These are companies that undoubtedly know how to...

MTS Faces Looming Threat to Dominance In Government Bonds.
February 11, 2008... The Italy-based MTS group of fixed-income platforms--long dominant in the interdealer, electronic trading of European government bonds--is facing growing competition as multiple countries are opening up trading to competitors. Belgian and...

Avox-GoldenSource Alliance.
February 11, 2008... Avox, a counterparty data management specialist, and GoldenSource Corp., a New York-based provider of enterprisewide data management (EDM) solutions, said that mutual clients will be able to integrate Avox's business entity data into the...

StreamBase-Reuters Upgrade.(StreamBase Systems)(Brief article)
February 11, 2008... StreamBase Systems, a provider of complex event processing technology, has released a new version of its StreamBase Studio Reuters Edition application development platform. The upgraded platform--version 1.0 was launched in November--offers...

NeoNet Links to Eurex.
February 11, 2008... Expanding its rapidly growing list of destinations, agency brokerage NeoNet said last week that it is providing direct-market access (DMA) to the Eurex derivatives exchange. Simon Nathanson, CEO and president of Stockholm-based NeoNet, said in...

FNX Integrated.(Brief article)
February 11, 2008... GL Trade, a Paris-based supplier of automated trading software, said that it has finished integrating FNX Solutions into its newly rebranded GL Trade Capital Markets Solutions business line, which includes the Aspen, Sierra, SierraLink, Cayman,...

A Lesson in Poor Password Practices.
February 11, 2008... French President Nicolas Sarkozy called the recent events at Societe Generale a "large-scale internal fraud." Societe Generale chairman Daniel Bouton said the fraud was a "one-off" and denied it was a trading or risk-management failure. ...

FSA: Firms Must Retain Investor Confidence.
February 11, 2008... The U.K.'s Financial Services Authority (FSA) on Jan. 29 released its Financial Risk Outlook--a yearly look at industry developments that the agency sees as risks to its regulatory objectives. The 2008 outlook was significantly less rosy than...

Order Routing Key to a Fragmented Europe~With MiFID in place, new venues will test brokers' ability to access liquidity.
February 11, 2008... As the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID) opens up Europe to multiple pools of liquidity, with quotes displayed on competing exchanges as well as multilateral trading facilities (MTFs), smart-order-routing technology will play...

London Exchange Linking to Multiple Clearinghouses~LSE is ramping up clearing competition with new routing service.
February 11, 2008... The London Stock Exchange (LSE) has raised the stakes in the European post-trade processing industry with the announcement that it will route executed trade orders to whichever clearinghouse its member firms select. LSE this month began...

GFI Group Acquires Trading Technology Vendor.
February 11, 2008... Interdealer brokerage GFI Group has acquired privately owned Trayport, a London-based provider of trading platforms, for about GBP84 million ($164 million), the companies announced on Feb. 1. GFI has been a Trayport customer since 2000. ...

Euronext Migrates Bonds to Luxembourg's Sage Platform.
February 11, 2008... NYSE Euronext is using the Luxembourg Stock Exchange's Sage platform to process corporate bonds listings and corporate actions in Europe, the companies announced last week. The Luxembourg exchange uses the Sage, or Systeme d'Admission et de...

Paladyne and SunGard Form Accounting Partnership.
February 11, 2008... Paladyne Systems, a New York-based provider of technology to hedge funds, is offering SunGard Data Systems' portfolio management software as part of its suite of hosted front- to back-office applications, the companies announced last week. ...

Charles River Connects to Omgeo in Japan.
February 11, 2008... Charles River Development said it has linked its order management system (OMS) to Omgeo's post-trade communications suite to provide mutual clients in Japan with a full front-to-back-office solution for processing domestic and international...

IBM Supplying Risk System to Chinese Securities Firm.
February 11, 2008... IBM Corp. is building a risk management system for Guotai Junan Securities in collaboration with Algorithmics, a Toronto-based provider of enterprise risk solutions. IBM says that the risk system for the Shanghai-based brokerage is its first...

Netik Accelerates Reference Data Race~Warehouse vendor switches.
February 18, 2008... With its acquisition of the reference data business of consultancy Capco, Netik is seeking to expand its product line at a time when financial firms are under increasing pressure to improve their data quality and integration. The deal was...

Are the Capital Markets Finally Ready for Wireless?
February 18, 2008... For a decade, the wireless industry waited for a development that never quite emerged: financial firm executives and their customers fully embracing mobile services for their business activities. Many of the companies that helped pioneer...

A Clearing Impediment to MiFID~Meeting cross-border goals will require structural adjustments.
February 18, 2008... The Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID) has prompted the emergence of a slew of alternative trading venues in Europe, with the expectation of more, less-costly platforms to come. But current exchange structures may delay the...

Thomson-Reuters Combo Heavy on E-swaps Systems.
February 18, 2008... The pending merger of Reuters and Thomson Corp. will bring multiple bond-trading platforms under one roof. How these systems will be integrated and marketed remains to be seen--neither company will comment until the deal is finalized--but...

FX Solutions Bought by City Index; Adds Web 2.0 Platform~Retail forex platforms with regional focus look to expand reach, product offerings.(Company overview)
February 18, 2008... Seeking to expand its offerings and geographic reach, FX Solutions, an online foreign exchange broker that operates as a market-maker to retail and institutional clients, agreed to be purchased by City Index Group, a London-based provider of...

Tokyo Exchange Pins Trading Glitch on Fujitsu System.
February 18, 2008... The Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) said that a fault in its Fujitsu-made software was responsible for the problems that on Feb. 8 halted some derivatives trading. The glitch caused the trading screen to show incorrect orders for the...

Fulcrum Adopts Geneva.
February 18, 2008... Hedge fund administrator Fulcrum said last week that it has switched to Advent Software's Geneva for portfolio management and fund accounting, replacing ShadoSuite from Edison, N.J.-based Shadow Financial Systems. Geneva's comprehensive...

ITG Inks Deal With FXall.(Investment Technology Group Inc.)(Brief article)
February 18, 2008... Investment Technology Group (ITG) has signed an agreement that gives its clients access to foreign exchange trading portal FXall, the companies said last week. According to the agreement, ITG, a provider of technology-based trading services and...

People in the News.
February 18, 2008... Corporate actions software provider XSP has named Anthony Scanga business analyst in its operations group. Scanga, who previously led a team of analysts processing global corporate actions at Bank of New York Mellon Corp., will be based in the...

Risk Conquers All?
February 18, 2008... Risk is top of mind at nearly every financial institution. Banks have been taking multibillion-dollar charges to account for risks they thought they had passed off their books. Companies that have insured trillions of dollars worth of bonds...

Pure Trading Connects to TNS.
February 18, 2008... Pure Trading has tapped data communications services provider Transaction Network Services (TNS) to provide connectivity for the Canadian alternative trading system (ATS)--operational since last month--via its managed extranet. Reston,...

Instinet Prepares Australian ATS; Forms Chi-X Global.
February 18, 2008... New York-based agency brokerage Instinet has formed a holding company, Chi-X Global, for its Chi-X alternative trading systems (ATSs) in Europe and Canada and its newly announced platform in Australia. Tony Mackay, who as president and...

Playing Catch-up in E-archiving~Many firms still need IT boost to meet e-communications requirements.
February 18, 2008... Changes to the U.S. Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), requiring companies to have enterprisewide retention policies for all electronic communications, went into effect on Dec. 1, 2006. As the deadline approached, observers predicted a...

The High Cost of Best Execution~U.S., European regulatory demands causing uncertainty, rising IT expenses.
February 18, 2008... Market-structure-altering regulations in the U.S. and Europe are driving broker-dealers to adopt new technology or find ways to boost the performance of existing systems. But some firms may be avoiding the issue altogether. The U.S....

Pre-trade Compliance: Better, Cheaper, Faster ~Firms answer regulatory, investor demands with added controls and third-party systems.
February 18, 2008... At the heart of Societe Generale's recent EUR4.82 billion ($7.01 billion) in losses from unauthorized trades is the fact that the accused trader--Jerome Kerviel--was able to use his knowledge of the system to get around the checks and balances....

Compliance Is Still People-Powered~Deloitte study says IT investments, integration can curb rising expenses.
February 18, 2008... Compliance spending is growing at a faster pace than income at many of the largest U.S. financial institutions. Though that trend will likely continue, some firms are making investments in technology and integrating systems, which should...

Iron Mountain: Toward a Paperless Office.
February 18, 2008... Boston-based information storage provider Iron Mountain last month unveiled a data repository that it says provides its clients with hosted storage and rapid access to digital copies of their physical records. The product, Digital Record...

Fund of Funds: Untapped Technology Market.
February 18, 2008... While some areas of financial services technology, such as archiving of electronic communications, are saturated with vendors and showing signs of slowing down, major opportunities remain in one affluent corner of the industry. A number of...

Cross-border Clearing Inches Across Europe~Voluntary initiatives alone.
February 25, 2008... Swiss exchange virt-x's clearing unit is actively seeking fungibility with other European exchanges, bringing cost and collateral benefits to customers and offering a sign of the industry's efforts to overcome one of the biggest obstacles of...

For Wall Street, a Matter of Semantics~New standards, technologies,products prompting adoption.
February 25, 2008... Semantics--the study of meaning in language--may date back to the ancient Greeks, but only now is a technological take on the subject gaining traction on Wall Street. Due in large part to the ever-escalating volumes of data that trading firms...

Speed of Data vs. Limits of Physics~In the pursuit of lower latency, collocation has limitations.
February 25, 2008... As increasing volumes of market data flow ever-more rapidly across a growing number of venues, the industry's technology infrastructure may not have the capacity to meet traders' desire for low latency. Approaches such as collocation--reducing...

Regulators Taking Aim at 12b-1 Fees ~SEC's Cox calls forthcoming proposal a complete overhaul'.
February 25, 2008... After years on the back burner, the Securities and Exchange Commission's rule governing mutual fund marketing fees is in store for a "complete overhaul," according to commission chairman Christopher Cox. Fees paid under Rule 12b-1, adopted...

NYSE Purchases OTC Valuation Unit, Rolls Out Buy-Side Service.
February 25, 2008... NYSE Euronext's new Web-based pricing service will help buy-side firms place market valuations on their complex structured products and illiquid securities, the exchange said last week. The system, Prime Source, is powered by EuronextValue,...

Belzberg's Deep Book.
February 25, 2008... In response to the U.S. pilot test of penny price increments, which expanded in September to 35 options classes, trading technology and agency brokerage firm Belzberg Technologies has launched a next-generation version of its options trading...

Irish Agents on CFF.
February 25, 2008... International depository Clearstream said that three Irish transfer agents will adopt its Central Facility for Funds (CFF) post-trade service for investment funds. According to Luxembourg-based Clearstream, some of the funds for which Capita...

People in the News.(Axes)(Turquoise)(National Investment Company Service Association)
February 25, 2008... New York-based Axes, a global agency broker and provider of electronic trading technology to developed, emerging and frontier markets, has named William Reekstin global business development executive. Reekstin joined the Auerbach Grayson & Co....

The Future of E-compliance.(Financial Industry Regulatory Authority)
February 25, 2008... Electronic communications encompass much more than just e-mail in this day and age. Employees use a variety of options to communicate on the job, whether they are sitting at their desks inside the office, sharing information remotely via the...

Donohue: Let Market Forces Determine Market Structure.(Craig Donohue)(Board of Trade of the City of Chicago Inc.)(Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc.)
February 25, 2008... Less than a week after the Department of Justice issued a letter saying that the "vertical" structure of the U.S. futures industry "may be unnecessarily inhibiting competition," CME Group chief executive Craig Donohue offered a staunch defense...

Strengthening Data Continuity, Euroclear Adds Backup Site.
February 25, 2008... International securities depository Euroclear's recent launch of a third backup data center--part of the EUR100 million ($148 million) disaster recovery program it initiated in 2003--reflects the financial services industry's continuing efforts...

BATS' Exchange Aspirations Open for Comment~NYSE, Nasdaq may invite extra constraints on fast-growing competitor.
February 25, 2008... The Securities and Exchange Commission is inviting public comments on the exchange application of the upstart BATS Trading electronic communications network (ECN) through March 29. The Kansas City-based ECN, which has built significant...

Euroclear Creating Messages to Fill ISO 20022 Gaps.
February 25, 2008... As Swift begins to phase out the International Organization for Standardization's (ISO) 15022 format in favor of the new ISO 20022 types, Euroclear Bank is developing messages to help address areas of 20022 that do not have exact counterparts...

Fidelity: More Brokers Ready to Switch Firms.
February 25, 2008... Though brokers and advisers are generally satisfied with their jobs and their firms' clearing and technology infrastructures, according to a recent survey, many more are likely to consider switching employers over the next 12 months than in the...

European Buy Side Sticks With E-bond Trading~Sifma study shows shift in motivation for e-trading, but continued growth.
February 25, 2008... Contrary to expectations that fixed-income buyers would return to voice brokers in a tumultuous market, electronic trading volumes in Europe were higher at year-end 2007 than in the previous year, according to a survey by the Securities...

GemStone System Offers Low Latency, Zero Data Loss.
February 25, 2008... In the quest for high-speed trading, data is sometimes at risk--very fast trading platforms can lose vital information due to so-called garbage collection and synchronization issues between data centers, among other problems. GemStone Systems,...