Securities Industry News articles from June 2005

Securities Industry News archives from June 2005

Reuters Is Off to the Races: Takes aim at high-performance traders with "ultra-low latency" data feed.
June 6, 2005... After more than a year in development, while algorithmic and other program trading methods rose to new levels of speed and sophistication, Reuters Group has launched a service that pulls it even with some of the technologies that had been...

Integral: Direct Access for FX.
June 6, 2005... Foreign exchange technology shop Integral Development Corp. claims it is introducing the world's first direct market access (DMA) platform for forex trades. The Mountain View, Calif. vendor's FX Inside platform takes the DMA trend that has...

Softening the Hard Close.
June 6, 2005... When the Securities and Exchange Commission set out to eliminate illegal late trading in mutual funds a year and a half ago, the idea of enforcing a "hard close" at 4:00 p.m. seemed so draconian that a flurry of alternative proposals floated to...

The Skeptical Regulator.
June 6, 2005... A lot can happen in one short week. Between the three-day Memorial Day weekend and our Friday publication date, the greatest journalistic mystery of our time was solved; the voters of France and the Netherlands--two European Union founding...

The Elements of IT Compliance.
June 6, 2005... As financial services firms begin to internalize the data security requirements of the Sarbanes-Oxley and Gramm-Leach-Bliley acts--and as they try to head off legislation on protecting confidential client financial information with preemptive...

Donaldson Ducks Out.(Securities and Exchange Commission)(William Donaldson )
June 6, 2005... Some Securities and Exchange Commission-watchers are expressing surprise that chairman William Donaldson announced his resignation as of June 30, but others point out that given the shifting political winds, it may have been the best time for...

TA Targets Trading--Again.
June 6, 2005... Staking further claim to leadership among private equity investors in emerging electronic markets, Boston-based TA Associates last week announced it will take a $50 million stake in the pioneering credit derivatives venue Creditex. The...

Money-Laundering Software Becomes Core Offering.
June 6, 2005... Scores of technology vendors have poured into the anti-money-laundering (AML) business even as the regulatory requirements that potential customers must satisfy continue to evolve. Now, some of these vendors are complementing their sales of...

BSA Demands New Approaches, Critics Allege.(Bank Secrecy Act)(GlobalVision Systems)
June 6, 2005... Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) compliance--along with the increasingly demanding expectations of the Treasury Department--is driving up demand for automated solutions to the point where major-league financial technology players are starting to get in...

Post-Sept. 11: AML Vendor Tie-Ups.(Brief Article)
June 6, 2005... * 2002: Fair Isaac, seller of Fico credit scores, purchased HNC. * 2003: Information collection and management firm Wolters Kluwer purchased customer identification and money-laundering detection systems vendor Atchley Systems. *2003:...

Small State, Big Step Toward Paperless Market.
June 6, 2005... An amendment to Delaware corporate law, passed last month, will eliminate one of the remaining barriers to a paperless securities industry in the U.S. Effective Aug. 1, Delaware-incorporated companies are no longer obligated to issue stock...

NeoNet Connects With Asian Brokerages.(Brief Article)
June 6, 2005... NeoNet Securities, an international agency broker that provides direct market access trading for investors, is seeking to build a presence in Asia and create partnerships with Asian-based brokerage firms or an investment bank with a large...

Omgeo Mapping New Path for Settlement Instructions.
June 6, 2005... Omgeo believes it has come up with a way to solve the long-standing problem of how to attach standing settlement instructions to a transaction to ensure accuracy in post-trade processing. Instead of relying on infrequently updated and...

Tower: Race to the Future.
June 6, 2005... As attendees arrived for global research firm TowerGroup's conference--"Road Maps for Growth"--in Boston last week, the directions for the future of the industry were not complicated or hard to follow. After dithering around in the slow lane of...

Thomson One's No. 1 Booster.(Interview)
June 6, 2005... Three years ago Lou Eccleston joined Thomson Financial to mount an attack on, among others, Bloomberg, where he had spent 14 years as a key member of senior management. Joining the New York-based unit of Thomson Corp. after a brief stint with...

Dubai: Financial Free-Trade Zone on the Persian Gulf.
June 6, 2005... This fall, Dubai--one of seven federated princedoms that make up the United Arab Emirates and already a major commercial center on the Persian Gulf--embarks on a bold experiment. Federal and local authorities are in the process of opening the...

Islamic Law and the Securities Markets.
June 6, 2005... What exactly is a shari'a-compliant security and how does it differ from the usual kind? At the Forum for Developing Markets held by the World Federation of Exchanges last week in Beijing, Securities Industry News posed this question to...

JSE's Parsons: New Order On the Cape of Good Hope.(JSE Securities Exchange)
June 6, 2005... Last year, Africa's largest exchange, the JSE Securities Exchange--the former Johannesburg Stock Exchange--tapped Accenture to implement a three-phase IT overhaul involving data management, migration from legacy systems, and a seven-year...

Options Down Under: Q&A With Colin Scully.(Australian Stock Exchange Ltd.)(Interview)
June 6, 2005... The Australian Stock Exchange has been trading options since 1976--just three years less than the Chicago Board Options Exchange--and considers itself a first mover in the field, having gone fully electronic in 1997. While some options...

BSA Direct: Dead on Arrival?(suspicious activity reports)
June 6, 2005... BSA Direct, the federal Financial Crimes Enforcement Network's (FinCEN) secure Web portal for incident reporting, can't get up and running fast enough to suit its proponents. Part of the government's response to the Sept. 11 attacks, BSA Direct...

The Weekly Factoid Feed.
June 6, 2005... Communication The New York Stock Exchange and the American Stock Exchange experienced a "communications problem" that shut down both exchanges four minutes before the 4 p.m. closing time last Wednesday. Reuters cited a "trading floor...

ISDA in Online Auction First.(International Swaps & Derivatives Association)
June 13, 2005... The International Swaps & Derivatives Association (ISDA) has tapped pricing vendor Markit Group and trading platform Creditex to administer an online auction for a credit default swap (CDS). The purpose of the auction, to be held June 14, is...

Citadel Enters the Mainstream: New hires bring retail bona fides to the table; back-office buildup nearly complete.
June 13, 2005... Citadel Investments Group, a giant among hedge funds and one of that sector's most advanced technology operators, is ramping up its back-office capabilities, in a bid to attract mainstream clientele including retail equities broker-dealers...

E-Trading Wave Sinks Harborside.
June 13, 2005... The institutional trading race lost an entrant but gained some clarity with the closing last month of Harborside+. The New York brokerage's blend of electronic execution and human intervention turned out to be a less-than-happy medium for...

Inventing Infrastructure.
June 13, 2005... The securities industry's infrastructure is a marvel of speed and efficiency. Some market models are faster and more efficient than others--constructive competition among those models could even be beneficial--and there are still lots of...

Yahoo Japan Introduces Users to E-Trade.
June 13, 2005... The online brokerage business just got a little more cutthroat in Japan. It's no longer enough to offer low commissions and convenient trading. By the end of the summer, customers will also be able to collect Yahoo "points" every time they make...

Fidelity Speaks.
June 13, 2005... The trillion-dollar mutual fund colossus Fidelity Investments is a well-oiled marketing machine, but it doesn't say much about itself. Being privately held, it doesn't have to make the detailed disclosures of a public firm. For that reason, the...

Credit Events Electrify CDS Market Data Consumers.(credit default swap)
June 13, 2005... The demand for accurate data on credit default swap (CDS) prices and curves has never been greater. With the relegation of Ford and GM's debt to "junk" status and all the talk of losses related to this kind of adverse credit event among hedge...

Swift, Global Tax Refunds.
June 13, 2005... New York-based Globe Tax Services announced late last month that it will offer the first Swift service bureau dedicated to standardizing part of the process of tax reclamation--the partial or full refund of taxes paid to foreign tax authorities...

Open Season on the FSA: Blair blast emboldens critics to complain publicly.(UK Financial Services Authority)(Tony Blair)
June 13, 2005... Three months ago a report from a prestigious think tank--the Centre for Policy Studies, headed by Lord Blackwell, a former Thatcher policy adviser and a director of SmartStream Technologies--declared open season on the U.K.'s Financial Services...

ISITC Forums Focus on Forex.(International Securities Association for Institutional Trade Communication)
June 13, 2005... The avowedly standards-agnostic International Securities Association for Institutional Trade Communication (ISITC), which held its quarterly meeting in San Francisco last week, has been steadily extending its influence among industry standards...

The BlackBerry: On the Air and Off The Record.
June 13, 2005... The Securities and Exchange Commission's Rule 17a-4 and the National Association of Securities Dealers' Rule 3110 require broker-dealers and exchange members to preserve all electronic communications pertaining to their firm's business, in a...

Stalking Talk: Nice Systems Pitches Audio Search to WSTA.(Wall Street Technology Association)
June 13, 2005... As more firms find themselves in the crosshairs of the Securities and Exchange Commission or states' attorneys general, or slapped with a discovery deadline in a civil court, preserving recordings of conversations between employees and clients...

PHLX Files Motion to Halt ISE Gold Index.(Philadelphia Stock Exchange Inc.)(International Securities Exchange)
June 13, 2005... A judge declined late last Wednesday to extend a temporary restraining order granted to the Philadelphia Stock Exchange that would have prevented the launch of the International Securities Exchange's recently announced ISE Gold Index (HVY), the...

Market Makers Evolving to Fight the Machine.(use of computers increasing in securities industry)
June 13, 2005... It's a plot straight out of The Terminator: Machines are taking over the world. Of all the technological upheavals sweeping the securities industry, nowhere are they more wrenching than in the market-making function. Market makers, whose...

Buying In: Piper Jaffray's Algo Bid.(David Mortimer)(Piper Jaffray & Co.)(Interview)
June 13, 2005... Wall Street loves its league tables, and now the rapidly emerging algorithmic trading business has earned one of its own. Tabb Group, the Westborough, Mass. research firm, ranked the leaders in a report released this month on institutional...

TowerGroup: Transparency May Dull Funds' Luster.
June 13, 2005... If you ask some people, hedge funds are sexy, mysterious, and seem to make a lot of money. Others have called them a plague of locusts and predict another meltdown along the lines of Long Term Capital Management. But whether they represent the...

Korean Unification: Three exchanges consolidate on a single platform for all asset classes.
June 13, 2005... The job of consolidating South Korea's three stock exchanges into one was formally completed in January when the tech-heavy Kosdaq merged with the nation's equities and futures exchanges into the Korea Exchange (KRX), based in Busan. The task...

Novo Mercado Gives Bovespa New Lease on Life.
June 13, 2005... Two years ago, Brazil's Novo Mercado ("new market") looked like a complete waste of time. The plan was for an index of companies committed to a higher standard of corporate governance than was required for listing on the Bolsa de Valores...

The Weekly Factoid Feed.(Instinet Group Inc. acquires Third Avenue Management L.L.C.)(Oracle Corp. acquires Timesten Inc.)(FutureTrade Technologies launches new version of its software )
June 13, 2005... Dropped Swap Starting at 8:15 a.m. on June 3, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange suffered what it called a "network storm" that halted foreign exchange futures trading on its Globex platform for an hour and a half. Instinet Group said in a...

Names in the News.(Software & Information Industry Association)(Human Inference)(Firstlogic Inc.)
June 13, 2005... It's All About the Data Marc Alvarez, executive vice president for products and marketing at New York-based data management provider TAP Solutions, has been named chairman of the securities model working group at the Financial Information...

Directed Order Decision Polarizes Exchanges.
June 13, 2005... The Securities and Exchange Commission on June 2 approved the Chicago Board Options Exchange's (CBOE) and Philadelphia Stock Exchange's (PHLX) separate but similar proposals to permit orders to be directed to options market makers. Both...

BOX To Build Up Capacity.(Boston Options Exchange)
June 13, 2005... The Boston Options Exchange (BOX) is looking to nearly double the capacity of its trading platform by the end of this year, said William Easley, managing director at the exchange. "We're looking to increase the capacity of our trading...

Philly Builds Backup Data Center.(Philadelphia Stock Exchange Inc.)
June 13, 2005... In response to expansion and the need to have an off-site alternative in case of an emergency, the Philadelphia Stock Exchange (PHLX) is planning to build a one-story "bunker-style" facility that will serve as its primary data center, running...

From Big Iron to Web Services.(Euronext)
June 13, 2005... Old mainframe applications never die, they just fade away--or get reincarnated as Web services. That's what happened at Euronext. The multinational exchange operator recently scrapped several old mainframe systems and transformed its legacy...

Dueling Data Saviors: Asset Control and GoldenSource spearhead rival bids to fix a fragmented mess.
June 20, 2005... Just as the challenges of managing vast, complex and often incompatible financial databases are coming to a head, two rival consortia of technology giants are coalescing around distinct proposals for solving the securities industry's data...

PHLX, NexTrade: Options Are Forever.(Philadelphia Stock Exchange)(NexTrade Holdings)(expirationless options)
June 20, 2005... NexTrade Holdings and the Philadelphia Stock Exchange (PHLX) are teaming up to try something new in the derivatives world: expirationless options. Dan Carrigan, PHLX's vice president for product development, says that the new product will...

CBOE Reclaims Agency Function.(Chicago Board Options Exchange)
June 20, 2005... The Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE), bending to the desires of its designated primary market makers (DPMs), is planning to take over their agency-brokerage functions. The move comes amid unconfirmed reports of regulatory inquiries into...

Themeless Extravaganza.(Securities industry's technological innovations)
June 20, 2005... It may seem like a lifetime ago, but there was a time when the Securities Industry Association's (SIA) Technology Management Conference wasn't the breakout hit of the group's busy events calendar. Once upon a time, when Iran and Madonna were...

The Zombie Threat: Evolving security risks are no longer faced only by the road warriors; they've infiltrated the home front and the heart of the enterprise.
June 20, 2005... "Zombied" PCs--and the spyware used to infiltrate, infect and silently control them--are everywhere, launching distributed denial of service attacks or tickling hard drives into giving up their precious secrets. Also on the rise are the "road...

Why Algo? Why Now?
June 20, 2005... Algorithmic trading is one of the hottest trends to hit Wall Street in the past year with many brokers--from agencies to large bulge brackets--scrambling to put together an offering to satisfy the appetites of institutional investors, mutual...

Hedge Funds Tighten Up.
June 20, 2005... If ever there were a market segment being driven forward by a confluence of events, it is today's fast-evolving hedge fund market. Once, it was an opaque vertical surrounded by mystery and occasional scandal, an elite vehicle for wealthy,...

Letter to the Editor.(Letter to the Editor)
June 20, 2005... "E-Trading Wave Sinks Harborside" (Securities Industry News, June 13) contains misconceptions about the recent closing of Harborside+ that merit clarification. At its peak, and not too long ago at that, Harborside was executing by far the...

Departure Leaves FIX in Hands of Futurists.(FIX Protocol Ltd.)
June 20, 2005... Scott Atwell, long-time co-chair of the FIX Protocol Ltd.'s (FPL) technical committee--now known as the global technical committee (GTC)--has stepped down and will be replaced by the newly elected Matt Simpson of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange...

E-communication Focus at First NYSE Regulation Meet.(New York Stock Exchange)
June 20, 2005... NYSE Regulation, an independent arm of the New York Stock Exchange, will hold its first annual securities conference this week, featuring a special session on the supervision of electronic communications. Regulators, executives and...

ISDA Operations Benchmark Survey Sees Signs of Progress in CDS Automation.(International Swaps & Derivatives Association)
June 20, 2005... The annual operations benchmarking survey published earlier this month by the International Swaps & Derivatives Association notes a steady increase in the reduction of confirmation backlogs in the OTC derivatives market--and also a continuing...

Volante Transforms Middleman Role.(Volante Technologies)
June 20, 2005... The volume, variety and velocity of transactions and other types of data transfer in financial services organizations are growing so fast, along with demands for real-time processing and applications to accomplish it, that firms are constantly...

Forex Regulation: Locked in the Back Office.(foreign exchange and hedge funds )
June 20, 2005... A lot of attention has been paid to the tug of war between regulators and the market with regard to hedge funds. That war is still being waged but what often gets lost in the shuffle is the state of regulation in the biggest market of all:...

TradePortal Releasing Market Maker Platform.
June 20, 2005... Early next month, TradePortal, a developer of software used to perform direct access trade execution, will be releasing MarketMatrix, an integrated trading platform for market makers. TradePortal is in the process of beta testing...

CodeStreet & TiVo: The Art of the Kludge.
June 20, 2005... If CodeStreet CEO Howard Pein had mentioned TiVO one more time in a recent telephone briefing with Securities Industry News, we were going to ask him--tongue in cheek--whether the New York City software development shop had a deal to...

BT Radianz: A World In Which Everywhere Is In New Jersey.
June 20, 2005... BT Radianz, the global financial mega-network born of British Telecommunications' recent acquisition of Radianz from Reuters, will use this week's Securities Industry Association Technology Management Conference in New York to launch Radianz...

Merchants of Speed: As algorithmic trading begins to dominate traffic, technology providers crowd the fast lane.
June 20, 2005... The Grand Prix season is in high gear--in the institutional trading world as on the international racing circuit. Based on the preliminaries, it seems this week's Securities Industry Association (SIA) Technology Management Conference is shaping...

Database Empires Embrace Upstart Tactics: When two relational-DB heavyweights move fast into vector-space and in-memory models and applications, you'd better believe that Wall Street is committed to the automation arms race.(Sybase Inc. and Oracle Corp.)
June 20, 2005... This month, Silicon Valley database empire Oracle acquired TimesTen, a young, nimble company that makes super fast, memory-resident databases. Last month, rival Sybase, the leading maker of databases for Wall Street applications, released its...

Battle of the Brands.(Technology Management Conference and Exhibit)
June 20, 2005... Competition of the most rough and tumble sort is nothing new to the titans of information technology, and their interest in the financial services industry--one of the most lucrative "vertical markets" for computers and software --has always...

SunGard Invests in SOA.
June 20, 2005... Three years of planning and technology development at SunGard Investment Systems culminate this week in the launch of InvestOne Enterprise, the latest version of the company's widely deployed fund accounting system for asset managers and...

Dashboard Partners Aim to Virtualize the Enterprise.(TIBCO Software Inc. and Business Objects S.A. become partners)
June 20, 2005... Enterprise integrator Tibco Software of Palo Alto, Calif. is known for embedding its software into the very fabric of securities firms' networks. Most recently, this has taken the form of a new wave of applications for business process...

Savvis, Sun in Return of the Thin Client.
June 20, 2005... Sun Microsystems and Savvis are set to announce a partnership that will leverage Savvis' utility computing services and Sun's desktop strengths. The goal is to provide Savvis with the network, storage and server architecture it needs to realize...

Track Data Drops Fee to 2.5 Mils.
June 20, 2005... Track Data Corp. has lowered its liquidity takeout fee to 2.5 mils--$.0025--per share. The firm said the new fee will be available on all orders sent through a direct connection to Track ECN--even orders from nonsubscribers. "This is...

TowerGroup's Ralph Silva on Europe After Europe.(evaluation of Financial Services Action Plan)
June 20, 2005... The fallout from last month's no vote on the European Constitution by the French and Dutch electorate may spell political trouble for the European Union, but it is unlikely to affect international financial services, according to a recent...

Staying on Messages: NYSE Regulation's Grace Vogel.(Grace B. Vogel of New York Stock Exchange Inc.'s division)(Interview)
June 20, 2005... As securities industry regulators target electronic communications, firms are under growing pressure to effectively supervise and retain not only e-mails but also instant messages, text messages and other types of electronic communication whose...

Richard Thornburgh: SIA's Ambassador at Large: Emeritus chair gets industry brass to.(Securities Industry Association)
June 20, 2005... Vice chairman Richard Thornburgh of Credit Suisse First Boston, the past chairman of the Securities Industry Association, has accumulated a lot of frequent flier miles in a career that began at the First Boston Corp. in 1976, took him to Zurich...

Eurex To Trade FX Futures.(Foreign exchange )
June 20, 2005... Eurex, the derivatives exchange jointly owned by Deutsche Borse and SWX Swiss Exchange, announced last week that it is entering the foreign exchange derivatives market, making its play for a domain currently dominated by the Chicago Mercantile...

Chicago-Amsterdam-Singapore Express: The largest American and European exchanges will soon be a local call away for Asian brokerage houses.(Chicago Board of Trade and Chicago Mercantile Exchange)
June 20, 2005... The Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) has announced that it is preparing to open a telecommunications hub in Singapore, following a similar gambit by the rival Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME). Working with its technology partner, Euronext.liffe...

Could It Happen Here?(reports of securities fraud)
June 27, 2005... When the news broke last week that a credit card transaction processor in Arizona had suffered a digital security breakdown, exposing up to 40 million customer account numbers to fraud, the CEO of a leading financial technology company was...

Ameritrade's Win May Be ADP's Loss.(Automatic Data Processing )
June 27, 2005... Ameritrade Holding Corp.'s acquisition of TD Waterhouse USA will not only create one of the top online brokerages in the U.S. but could also halt--or at least delay--the emergence of a new paradigm in the trade processing and clearing industry....

Soft Touch or Hard Line.
June 27, 2005... The Securities and Exchange Commission has delayed its decision on new rules for the use of soft-dollar commissions, but that isn't preventing the industry from speculating about the possibilities--and preparing. Indeed, even if the SEC...

A Sobering Contrast.(Securities Industry Association's Technology Management Conference)
June 27, 2005... Two very different sides of the securities industry were on display in New York last week. On the West Side, the exhibit floors at the Securities Industry Association's Technology Management Conference were chockablock with the latest in...

Nazareth on Conflicts.(Annette Nazareth)
June 27, 2005... Addressing NYSE Regulation's inaugural conference in New York (see page 9), Annette Nazareth, the director of the Securities and Exchange Commission's market regulation division, devoted part of her speech to a review of how conflicts of...

AIS Wins Cash Infusion From Icap's Spencer.( Michael Spencer)
June 27, 2005... Alternative Investment Solutions, one of a handful of surviving independent hedge fund administrators, has received a cash infusion of undisclosed size from Michael Spencer, chief executive of interdealer brokerage Icap. Spencer, who is...

NYSE To Put a Dollar Amount on Lavish'.
June 27, 2005... New York Stock Exchange regulators are preparing a proposal for a rule that would place "hard dollar" caps on the gift and entertainment expenditures of exchange members for the first time. The proposal is currently under review by NYSE...

Industry Still Rattled by Sarbox Law.
June 27, 2005... When different regulators make divergent compliance demands on the industry, cases start cropping up in which milestones and deadlines that satisfy one regulator won't buy a thrill with the next. Indeed, the industry has been lobbying hard all...

NYSE, Nasdaq Tech Execs Outline Post-Merger Plans.(Nasdaq Stock Market Inc., New York Stock Exchange Inc.)
June 27, 2005... There were no fireworks Thursday as the heads of technology of the two biggest U.S. exchanges made a rare joint appearance at the closing session of the Securities Industry Association's Technology Management Conference. In dueling...

IT Vendors Plug Their Stuff at SIA.(Securities Industry Association)
June 27, 2005... Software and systems vendors showed off their latest wares at the Securities Industry Association's Technology Management Conference last week in New York. Prominently displayed: a slew of new product enhancements and tools for the trading...

Sun Shines Light on Obscure Process Bottleneck.(Claimonitor Ltd.)
June 27, 2005... Clearing-related claims that arise between custodian banks and asset managers often end up buried at the bottom of a pile of paper without ever getting resolved. Now, Sun Microsystems is championing a U.K. start-up with a new Sun-based...