Securities Industry News articles from June 2008

Securities Industry News archives from June 2008

Sec Lending Sees Challenges, Opportunities in Credit Crunch.
June 2, 2008... Global custodian Northern Trust Corp. in March said that a $13.5 billion collective short-term extendable portfolio, or Step, cash collateral pool was hit with an unrealized loss of 1.35 percent for the month. Northern Trust is far from the...

Dealers Seeking Home-Field Advantage in OTC Derivatives.
June 2, 2008... Dealers are escalating their efforts to maintain control over the development of the lucrative over-the-counter derivatives market, say observers, as reflected by a pair of investment bank consortiums that are planning to launch interdealer...

Jitter Chatter Is Getting Louder~Consistent messaging flow a growing Wall Street priority.
June 2, 2008... In an industry where milliseconds often mean the difference between success and failure, hiccups in the flow of messaging traffic can have a major impact. Despite recent Wall Street cutbacks, spending on technology related to low-latency...

BATS Deal With Yahoo Reignites Market Data Reform Debate.
June 2, 2008... BATS Trading began providing unlimited real-time stock quotes to Yahoo Finance's 19 million users last week--a promising development for a platform that expects to be granted exchange status shortly, as well as a step toward reforming the...

NSX's East Coast Headquarters.
June 2, 2008... The Chicago-based National Stock Exchange (NSX) last month established an East Coast headquarters in Jersey City, N.J. The exchange originally opened a facility in Jersey City in April 2005, when it began developing its NSX Blade technology...

BATS' New York Expansion.(appointments of Joe Bracco and Tom Cesare at BATS Trading)(Brief article)
June 2, 2008... The BATS Trading electronic communications network has opened an expanded New York office, hiring two salespeople and shifting Randy Williams, VP of sales and communications, to the new location. "We are a Kansas City company and will remain...

Credit Suisse AES on Reuters.
June 2, 2008... Credit Suisse's Advanced Execution Services (AES) forex algorithms are now available to users of the Reuters Trading for Foreign Exchange (RTFX) network for currency transactions, a move the companies say will support the increasing use of...

FRSGlobal Links to Temenos.
June 2, 2008... At the annual Temenos Client Forum last week in Rome. London-based FRSGlobal announced it has integrated its regulatory reporting solution with the T24 platform from Geneva-based banking software provider Temenos Group. Under the agreement,...

People in the News.(promotion of Gavin Little-Gill at Linedata Services)(appointment of Eric Hess at Direct Edge)
June 2, 2008... Linedata Services, a Paris-based order management and portfolio management systems provider, has promoted Gavin Little-Gill to EVP of front-office solutions operations for North America. Little-Gill, who joined the company last June as SVP of...

Algo Trading Takes Strides in Asia.
June 2, 2008... Improved market infrastructure and increased buy-side demand have put electronic trading at the top of the agenda in the Asia-Pacific markets. Until recently, electronic trading faced significant structural and regulatory obstacles to...

Wall Street and Washington: Striking a Balance.(Conference notes)
June 2, 2008... Speaking at the Wall Street to Washington conference hosted by the Securities Industry & Financial Markets Association (Sifma) last month, Anthony Ryan, the Treasury Department's assistant secretary for financial markets, pointed out that the...

Small Firms Wary of Efforts to Fortify Fund Industry~Panelists recommend creativity to cost-efficiently comply with PWG guidelines.(Discussion)
June 2, 2008... Can two traders with a Bloomberg terminal still start a hedge fund? That question was on the mind of at least one small fund manager at a recent roundtable on best practices. On April 15, two private-sector committees selected by the...

Wombat Signs Equiduct for OneMarketData Solution.
June 2, 2008... Wombat, a market data technology provider acquired by NYSE Euronext in March, has signed a contract with Borse Berlin to deploy OneMarketData's OneTick solution on the Equiduct Trading platform, expected to launch this year. OneTick,...

Chinese Brokers Reinvesting Record Profits.(Financial report)
June 2, 2008... After racking up record profits last year, Chinese brokerages say they plan to spend the money on technology systems and expanding their services. According to recently released data from the Securities Association of China (SAC), the...

New Routing Initiative, Capital for Canada's CNQ.(Canadian Trading & Quotation System)(Integrated Transaction Systems)
June 2, 2008... Exchange operator Canadian Trading & Quotation System (CNQ) has partnered with Integrated Transaction Systems (ITS), a Toronto-based technology provider, on an order router designed to help clients trade in a fragmenting Canadian equities...

Rebranded Pinks Sheets Beefs Up OTC Credibility.(Pink OTC Markets)
June 2, 2008... Pink Sheets, provider of an interdealer electronic quotation and trading platform for the over-the-counter equities market, in April changed its name to Pink OTC Markets. Despite the switch, the pink sheets category of OTC stocks quoted by the...

Dow Jones Launches Portfolio Tracking Platform.
June 2, 2008... Dow Jones & Co. has introduced a set of charting and portfolio tools for online financial services providers. The platform--MarketForce--is being offered by the client solutions unit of Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group (EMG), which caters...

Creditex Deal Makes ICE a CDS Player~Clearing is a focus of the $625 million agreement.
June 9, 2008... In a move that will give it a sizable share of the lucrative credit default swaps (CDS) market, the IntercontinentalExchange (ICE) has agreed to acquire Creditex Group, an interdealer brokerage and processor of credit derivatives. The...

Fidelity Launches HybridOne To Capture Coveted Breakaways.
June 9, 2008... Fidelity Investments, a major player in the investment advisory and brokerage support businesses, is integrating its operations backing representatives that hold both types of licenses--customers that its rivals are also pursuing. Fidelity...

Transition Managers' Volatile Times.
June 9, 2008... Market volatility is making the job of transition managers a lot tougher: Not only must they execute trades flawlessly across a constantly expanding selection of liquidity pools, but also offer clients greater transparency behind their...

Fixed-Income Compliance Is Moving Upstream.
June 9, 2008... Fixed-income products can be a compliance nightmare. Compared to the thousands of equities instruments, there are millions in the fixed-income world, and some of those might not be traded for months--or years--making pricing largely a judgment...

BOX Adds Pricing Tier.
June 9, 2008... Potentially signaling an escalation of the pricing competition in the options market, the Boston Options Exchange (BOX) has introduced a lower pricing tier for three of the most liquid classes. Under BOX's maker-taker fee schedule, liquidity...

Morgan's Dark Pool Navigator.
June 9, 2008... Morgan Stanley last week introduced a new algorithm--NightOwl--that navigates select dark pools and displayed venues, providing users with what the firm touts as access to the "most natural liquidity possible." NightOwl, which is available as a...

People in the News.
June 9, 2008... Icap Electronic Broking CEO Jack Jeffery has joined SuperDerivatives, a provider of options pricing, benchmarking and risk management systems, as chief operations officer. Jeffery had been chief executive of EBS Group, a foreign exchange...

Watching for Rogue Traders.
June 9, 2008... While rogue trading is not new, the magnitude of recent losses has banks looking at prevention with renewed urgency. The credit meltdown, a series of bad quarters and Societe Generale's January trading loss of EUR4.9 billion--and a nudge or two...

Chi-X's Randall: Smart-Order Routing Key.
June 9, 2008... Since the European Union's Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID) took effect in November, the Chi-X Europe alternative trading platform has been one of the biggest beneficiaries, according to Peter Randall, CEO of the venue. ...

SEC Plays IT Catch-up: Like Turning a Battleship'.
June 9, 2008... Leading-edge technology has not traditionally been a hallmark of the Securities and Exchange Commission. In 2005, TowerGroup noted that information technology typically accounted for just 8 percent of the commission's annual budget. Rather...

Private Equity Firm TCV Takes Stake in MarketAxess.
June 9, 2008... Institutional bond-trading platform operator MarketAxess said last week that private equity firm Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV) has agreed to purchase a 10 percent stake in the New York-based company for $35 million in preferred stock and...

Regional U.S. Carbon Market Could Prompt Federal System.
June 9, 2008... Although the U.S. pioneered the cap-and-trade approach for sulfur dioxide in the 1990s and boasts the world's oldest carbon marketplace--the Chicago Climate Exchange--it remains the only industrialized nation that hasn't ratified the Kyoto...

Canada's First Carbon-Trading Market Launches.
June 9, 2008... The Montreal Climate Exchange (MCeX), a joint venture of the Montreal Exchange (MX) and Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX), launched May 30 with a futures contract on Canada carbon dioxide equivalent units. The exchange, first announced two...

CEP Vendors Seeking Broader Audience~Usage growing, event processing looks to become enterprise-friendly.(Conference notes)
June 9, 2008... As financial firms continue to apply complex event processing (CEP) technology to an ever broader array of activities--not simply algorithmic trading or smart-order routing--vendors are upgrading their platforms and forging new partnerships to...

Risk, Liquidity, E-trading Headline Sifma Tech Show.(Conference notes)
June 9, 2008... As many as 8,000 people are expected to pack into the New York Hilton this week for the U.S. securities industry's largest annual technology conference. For most of them, two topics that have been garnering recent headlines are probably top of...

Focus Sharpens as Spending Slows~European brokers buy order-routing technology, U.S. shopping for pricing, risk systems.
June 9, 2008... Brokerage firms face a delicate balancing act over the next year. At a time when precarious financial markets are pushing Wall Street to cut operating expenses, there is a crying need for increased resources in areas such as risk management and...

Acquisition-Hungry Oracle Grows Financial Services Presence.
June 9, 2008... Oracle Corp., a technology giant that has gobbled up dozens of smaller vendors over the past few years, is approaching the financial services industry from both horizontal and vertical perspectives, says Don Russo, group VP of its financial...

New Trade Group Tackles Event Processing Standards.
June 9, 2008... As complex event processing (CEP) technology spreads across industries and disciplines, a new non-profit association wants to encourage that growth by establishing best practices and standardized terminology. Unveiled last week, the Event...

Processing Power: Why Buy When You Can Rent?
June 9, 2008... Major financial services firms are moving some of their processing work to facilities run by technology companies such as IBM Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) and Sun Microsystems, pure data center managers like Equinix and Savvis, and even...

E-tailer Amazon Offers Cheap Compute Power.
June 9, 2008... Online retail giant Amazon is providing financial firms with an inexpensive way to rent compute power cheaply--Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. The company says that customers can get set up on the service quickly, drawing on vast resources while...

Tideway Aims to Weed Out the Mystery' Machines.(Tideway Systems)
June 9, 2008... Shutting down servers that aren't being used is an obvious step toward getting more from an existing data center. Yet Kosten Metreweli, VP of product marketing at London-based Tideway Systems, says his company finds that between 2 percent and 5...

A Matching Engine for Content~InfoEx automates the sales-trading function.
June 16, 2008... New York-based start-up Info-Exchange is bringing the matching engine concept to the pre-trade information-gathering process with a platform that filters content to meet investors' specific needs. Headed by Dean Stamos, co-founder and...

Green Technology Getting White Hot~ Banks look to data centers for savings, smaller footprint.(Company overview)
June 16, 2008... Relentlessly rising oil prices and the widespread acknowledgement of the role of human activity in increasing greenhouse gas emissions have made climate change a primary concern for businesses and governments worldwide. In the financial...

DTCC Bringing Mutual Fund-Like Benefits to Alternative Investments.
June 16, 2008... The Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. (DTCC) is aiming to make its Alternative Investment Products (AIP) platform a prime example of back-end processing services having a dramatic impact on a market. DTCC on June 3 announced that it had...

Bolstering Tech Business, NYSE Offers Hosted Services Platform.
June 16, 2008... NYSE Euronext gave its expanding commercial technology business a boost last week, introducing a hosted platform that allows technology vendors to offer their applications and services to financial firms on the Secure Financial Transaction...

OTC Operations Summit.
June 16, 2008... At a June 9 meeting, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and 17 broker-dealers hammered out a new agenda to bolster the operational infrastructure of the over-the-counter derivatives market. The focus was on near-term steps that firms can take...

A CBOE-Korea Agreement.(Chicago Board Options Exchange Inc.)(Korea Exchange)(Brief article)
June 16, 2008... The Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) and Korea Exchange (KRX) said last week that they had signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to share information and pursue "mutually beneficial" business opportunities. Jung-hwan Lee,...

Icap Taps Accenture.(Brief article)
June 16, 2008... Technology consultancy Accenture has signed a five-year deal with London-based interdealer Icap to manage its European credit trading platform. Accenture says it will provide the development and outsourcing services through its Global Delivery...

First Coverage, Version Two.(Brief article)
June 16, 2008... Toronto-based First Coverage has released a new version of its Web-based research platform, which is designed to streamline interaction, improve workflow and increase transparency between the buy side and institutional salespeople. The upgraded...

People in the News.
June 16, 2008... Stockholm-based Tbricks, a technology start-up that in March launched its first product--Genesis, a multi-asset-class trading system--has named Urs Rutschmann chief operating officer. Rutschmann, who since 2003 has been CEO of actant, a...

Long on Issues, Short on Time.(United States. Securities and Exchange Commission)
June 16, 2008... Members of the Senate Banking Committee, at a June 3 confirmation hearing to fill three vacancies, agreed that the Securities and Exchange Commission needs to operate at full strength to move forward quickly with the many issues on its plate....

Credit Suisse Spins Off Virtual Machine Company~DynamicOps to offer stand-alone desktop and server virtualization.
June 16, 2008... Credit Suisse has spun off a technology company--DynamicOps--to market an internally developed application for virtual infrastructure management. "DynamicOps will sell a desktop and server virtualization software with a management function...

Fimat Veteran Kloet Will Head TMX Group.
June 16, 2008... TMX Group, created from last month's combination of Toronto Stock Exchange parent TSX Group and the Montreal Exchange, has named Thomas Kloet CEO. Kloet will start in the position on July 14, replacing TSX Markets president Rik Parkhill...

Sifma Addressing Financial Crisis Behind the Scenes~CEO Ryan says organization is tackling securitized and structured products.
June 16, 2008... The Securities Industry & Financial Markets Association (Sifma) is actively responding to the current market problems, says Timothy Ryan, the organization's president and CEO. But for now it is doing so out of sight of the media, working with...

Nyfix CEO on European Expansion, FIX Extension.(chief executive officer)(Interview)
June 16, 2008... Electronic trading solutions provider Nyfix is enjoying an eventful year. With six months remaining on the calendar, the New York-based company has already hit a milestone, made an acquisition and launched a hidden liquidity venue in Europe....

Bloomberg Professional Runs on Windows Mobile.(Conference notes)
June 16, 2008... Bloomberg Professional subscribers can now use the service on their Windows Mobile handheld devices, which Microsoft Corp. hopes will help it make gains in the BlackBerry-dominated financial services industry. Any phone equipped with...

Vhayu Squeezer Compresses Market Data.(Vhayu Technologies Corp.)
June 16, 2008... Vhayu Technologies Corp. says its new Squeezer technology can compress market data by four times with no negative impact on real-time queries and analytics. The solution, announced last week at the Securities Industry & Financial Markets...

BT Radianz Introduces MaketPulse VoIP Service.(Conference notes)
June 16, 2008... BT Radianz, the financial extranet business of U.K.-based BT Group, has unveiled a solution that delivers VoIP, or voice-over-Internet protocol, services to the trading room over the company's connectivity platform. Dubbed MaketPulse, the...

Tradeweb Dealer-Backers To Extend Usage of STP Service.
June 16, 2008... The ten broker-dealers who, along with Thomson Reuters, own the Tradeweb fixed-income platform have agreed to use its straight-through processing (STP) service for all U.S. cash fixed-income securities, including those traded over the...

Transfer Agents to DTC: Not So Fast Do~proposed operational changes overstep bounds?
June 23, 2008... U.S. transfer agents are battling with the Depository Trust Co. (DTC) over guidelines for their participation in a service that lets investors hold shares through direct registration. Since DTC first proposed changes to the Fast Automated...

Could Revamped NYSE Fix Fragmentation?
June 23, 2008... A bevy of proposed rule changes from the New York Stock Exchange, designed to accelerate automation while maintaining most of the exchange's distinctive characteristics, was applauded last week by brokers anxious for a solution to mend the...

Latency Testers Take Magnifying Glass to End-to-End Performance.
June 23, 2008... With trading firms dwelling on the tiniest delays in their systems, a growing number of technology companies are making a name for themselves by offering tools that test, monitor and rate end-to-end latency in real time. Testing service...

Joint Solution for Corporate Actions In XBRL and ISO?(XBRL US)(International Organization for Standardization)
June 23, 2008... XBRL International's U.S. branch is talking with the Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. (DTCC) about establishing semantic interoperability between the extensible business reporting language and International Organization for Standardization...

Nasdaq's New Market Replay.
June 23, 2008... Expanding the functionality of its Market Replay tool, which offers a graphical interface to analyze historical quote data, Nasdaq OMX Group is releasing an enhanced version July 1 that provides more timely information on the price and size of...

TradElect, Year Two.
June 23, 2008... The London Stock Exchange (LSE) last week celebrated the one-year anniversary of TradElect and made public its plans for the electronic trading platform's future. LSE says that since the introduction of TradElect, which was upgraded in...

People in the News.(appointments)
June 23, 2008... Jersey City, N.J.-based Knight Capital Group has formed a dedicated transition management unit and hired Lambright Financial Solutions co-founder Shuana Lambright (left) to head it. Joining her in the move from Lambright Financial, a...

Where Is the Leadership?
June 23, 2008... Nearly a year after turmoil hit the global financial markets, and three months since the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department stepped in to prevent the failure of Bear Stearns, is there any comprehensive effort by the financial services...

Geithner on Reducing Systemic Risk.(Timothy Geithner)
June 23, 2008... On June 9, Wall Street's largest broker-dealers met with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to outline initiatives to beef up the operational infrastructure of the over-the-counter derivatives market. Earlier that day, New York Fed president...

RSP Launches Continuous Market for Bankruptcy Claims~Platform extends reach to third illiquid market with T-Rex acquisition.
June 23, 2008... Tackling its second illiquid market in the last four months, Restricted Stock Partners (RSP) has purchased a trading platform for bankruptcy claims, a market whose opacity often results in creditors selling their claims at steep discounts. ...

JP Morgan Expands OTC Collateral Management Service.
June 23, 2008... JP Morgan Chase & Co. has expanded its collateral management service for over-the-counter derivatives by adding automated reconciliation through the triResolve solution of Stockholm-based TriOptima. "Trade reconciliation is challenging in...

FIXatdl: Algo Solution or Just More Custom Tags?
June 23, 2008... FIX Protocol Ltd. (FPL) has released a new version of its XML-based specification for advanced algorithmic trading support, four months after it became a fully approved standard. The FIX algorithmic trading definition language (FIXatdl), an...

SunGard Connects to MetaBit FIX Network in Japan.
June 23, 2008... SunGard Data Systems has integrated its SunGard Transaction Network (STN) with Tokyo-based trading technology vendor MetaBit's market liquidity hub, the Wayne, Pa.-based company announced last week. MetaBit touts its platform as the only...

Avistar Introduces Research Collaboration Community.
June 23, 2008... Avistar Communications Corp. has developed a platform that will let buy- and sell-side firms' research staff and their corporate clients collaborate in real time via their desktops. Expected to launch in September, the Securities Community...

QSG Study Offers Evidence of Dark Pool Benefits.
June 23, 2008... Seeking to measure the benefits of trading on non-displayed alternative trading systems, Quantitative Services Group (QSG), a consulting firm and equity-analytics provider, has completed an analysis of Nyfix Millennium's first-quarter execution...

Post-Merger BGC Plots Hybrid Course Across Asset Classes.
June 30, 2008... BGC Partners is demonstrating its post-merger strategy with a series of initiatives as it works to integrate the offerings of predecessors BGC, a primarily voice-based interdealer broker, and electronic-focused eSpeed. The ultimate goal,...

Latency Focus Missing the Forest?
June 30, 2008... Latency in order routing and market data distribution is under siege. Hardware and software vendors are joining forces with labs and performance gurus on both sides of the Atlantic to analyze performance in exacting detail and eliminate...

NYSE Considers Fee Overhaul; Maker-Taker Is On the Table ~Big Board wants to attract electronic flow while maintaining differences.
June 30, 2008... After proposing major changes to its market structure earlier this month, the New York Stock Exchange is looking at liquidity-drawing incentives that could bring it more in line with competitors' maker-taker pricing models. NYSE has long...

Harmonizing Accounting Standards No Easy Task~Uniformity could promote cross-border investment, but when?
June 30, 2008... While U.S. regulators and their foreign counterparts have long cited the need for global accounting standards, it has been harder to find agreement on who would enforce them and how soon they could be implemented in the U.S. Attendees at a...

Hong Kong Merc Gears Up.
June 30, 2008... The Hong Kong Mercantile Exchange (HKMEx), a venue intended to "bridge international commodities markets with China," announced last week that it is aiming to begin trading in first-quarter 2009. "Commodity trading and consumption in China and...

Neonet in Algo Partnerships.
June 30, 2008... Neonet, a Stockholm-based technology provider and agency brokerage, said last week that it is integrating its algorithms into third-party trading platforms. Thus far, execution management systems providers Fidessa LatentZero, InfoReach and...

Larsson Leaves, Nasdaq Exec Will Head DIFX.
June 30, 2008... Effective July 1, Nasdaq OMX Group veteran Jeffrey Singer will replace Per Larsson as chief executive of the Dubai International Financial Exchange (DIFX). The move is expected to further strengthen ties between Nasdaq, which took a 33 percent...

Beyond the Multicore Dilemma.
June 30, 2008... While financial services firms have been dealing with very challenging market conditions, one certainty is that growth will return in both the volume and the complexity of financial transactions. Existing and new financial instruments will...

For Some, Auction Rate Woes Offer Opportunity.
June 30, 2008... As investor lawsuits against brokerages over possible auction rate securities (ARS) irregularities pile up, some companies are finding opportunities in the collapsed market. Trading platform operators Napa Group and Restricted Stock Partners...

RiskMetrics Gives Funds Free Risk Transparency Service.
June 30, 2008... Seeking to bring greater transparency to the hedge fund industry, Risk- Metrics Group is providing fund managers with a free service--HedgePlatform Community--that lets them issue end-of-month reports to investors. The platform's fund...

Nasdaq Lends Ukrainian Market Helping Hand.(Company overview)
June 30, 2008... Suffering from a lack of liquidity and poor securities processing, Ukraine is hoping that Nasdaq OMX Group can provide some relief and bring the country's markets more international attention. Nasdaq announced earlier this month that it had...

China Resumes Admitting Foreign Brokerages.
June 30, 2008... Chinese regulators have granted Credit Suisse permission to open a joint- venture investment bank with Beijing-based Founder Securities, ending a moratorium on foreign brokerage investment that started in September 2006. Credit Suisse,...

Transaction Monitoring as the Last Line of AML Defense.(anti-money laundering)
June 30, 2008... For banks and broker-dealers, adequately identifying risks posed by new clients during the account-opening process can be daunting. Often, firms are exposed to risk from beneficial owners who may be several layers removed from the prospective...