Securities Industry News articles from March 2007

Securities Industry News archives from March 2007

International Exchange Accords: Structural Improvement, or Public Relations Hype?
March 5, 2007... What looked like a frenzy of securities exchange merger deals--the Australian Stock Exchange and Sydney Futures Exchange; the New York Stock Exchange with Archipelago and now with Euronext; Nasdaq Stock Market's abortive attempt to acquire the...

Omgeo Central Trade-Matching Service, A First for Canada, Ready to Go Live.
March 5, 2007... Post-trade communications giant Omgeo is announcing today that it will be the first central trade-matching service to be operational in Canada, after fully testing a link with a fund manager client to the country's central securities...

BT, Wombat Tapped For Thomson's Low-Latency Feeds.
March 5, 2007... Thomson Financial has called on Wombat Financial Software and BT Radianz to ensure low-latency performance in its new data feed for supporting algorithmic and black-box trading. Wombat is providing its high-performance feed-handling technology...

Advisory Firm Cuts Out Paperwork With Focus on Front-End Data Collection, STP.(Transamerica Financial Advisors )
March 5, 2007... It's a broker's dream--especially an independent contractor's--to be able to eliminate having to overnight new-account forms for review by branch managers, who would no longer have to store the documents in backroom file cabinets. An automated...

Excel Spreadsheets Get an Accellerant: Aspeed Software Gives Added Boost to Microsoft Application.
March 5, 2007... It's been years in development, and several months delayed in release, but Microsoft Corp.'s enhanced Office Excel 2007, with high-performance features that traders and financial modelers are supposed to love, is finally shipping. But there's a...

Excel Ready for a Faster Lane.
March 5, 2007... Stevan Vidich, industry architect for financial services at Microsoft Corp., is understandably enthusiastic about the performance upgrades found in Excel 2007. "It's redesigned with new multi-threaded engines, seamlessly, on its own," he said....

Market Correction.
March 5, 2007... The 400-plus point drop of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) on Feb. 27 had a technological undertone. The jolt was triggered by a stock sell-off in China and bearish comments by former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan in Hong...

Sizing Up Hedge Funds.
March 5, 2007... The number of hedge funds that report to databases grew 61 percent in 2006, according to the PerTrac Hedge Fund Database Study by alternative investments software company PerTrac Financial Solutions. The study, done annually since 2003, tallies...

Goldman Connections.(appointments of Goldman Sachs executives to positions in the United States' government)
March 5, 2007... U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson is a former Goldman Sachs Group chief executive. Robert K. Steel, his undersecretary for domestic finance, who delivered a major speech last week on hedge fund oversight (see page 6), was a Goldman vice...

The Master Data Hub Solution.
March 5, 2007... Institutional banks are diligently looking to improve the automation of reference data management as part of an industrywide effort to more accurately manage risk while cutting costs and improving the customer experience. Reference data...

Amplifying the Regulators' Hedge Fund Guidelines.
March 5, 2007... On Feb. 22, the president's working group on financial markets--a panel chaired by Secretary of the Treasury Henry M. Paulson and consisting of the heads of the Federal Reserve Board, Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures...

Spotfire Unveils Visual Analytics Software for Financial Services.
March 5, 2007... Business intelligence software company Spotfire has rolled out a product that helps asset managers make faster decisions using data visualization techniques. The software is an outgrowth of the Spotfire DXP enterprise analytics platform. ...

Op Risk Management Gears Up for Electronic Trading.
March 5, 2007... The operational risks that accompany the growth of electronic trading can present opportunities if they are managed optimally, says a report from Needham, Mass. research firm TowerGroup. It points to the exponential growth of electronic trading...

Clearer Using Fetter Logic for Account Aggregation.
March 5, 2007... National Financial Services (NFS), Fidelity Investments' clearing unit, is rolling out an investment data aggregation and management service that by spring will include annuities, giving representatives a more comprehensive view of customers'...

Webster Bank Lured by Uvest and Parent LPL.
March 5, 2007... Drawn to Uvest Financial Services' technology and viewing its acquisition by Linsco/Private Ledger (LPL) as a plus, Webster Bank has signed a five-year contract with the third-party marketer (TPM). The Waterbury, Conn. bank, which caters to...

In Corporate Actions, Perfect Harmony Is Elusive: Panel of experts weigh in on the prospects for coordination along the processing chain.(Discussion)
March 5, 2007... Standardization and harmonization. Those are the two interrelated watchwords market players use in describing what is needed--and too often lacking--when it comes to ensuring the efficient and timely processing of corporate actions. As...

Where Low (Latency) Is High (Value).
March 5, 2007... Obtaining market data used to be as simple as taking a feed or terminal from an aggregator such as Bloomberg, Reuters or Thomson Financial. But high-frequency electronic trading and direct-market access (DMA) have made it a lot more...

EDM Awareness Must Precede Standardization: Council chief Atkin sees wider recognition of industry's data dependence.
March 5, 2007... In June 2005, representatives of BearingPoint, Cicada Companies, GoldenSource Corp., IBM Corp. and SunGard Data Systems met in New York to address the operational challenges and complexities arising from the decentralized management of data in...

Muni Bond Data at Center of Patent Dispute: Legal heavyweights clash as Florida vendor sues nonprofit.
March 12, 2007... A dispute over the validity of a patent for disclosure of data on municipal bond issuers has raised the question of whether a commercial vendor or a non-profit organization has the right to collect and distribute financials and other material...

BT Radianz Lands Euroclear Contract.
March 12, 2007... BT Radianz is the first network provider to sign a contract to connect customers of the Euroclear depositories through a new common communication interface (CCI). Beginning in 2008, the CCI will be used for services of all Euroclear operating...

Reacting to Market Break, NYSE and Nasdaq Act on Capacity.
March 12, 2007... On Feb. 27, when a broad sell-off pushed the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) down 416 points, the New York Stock Exchange's SuperDot system, which can handle 20,000 messages per second, couldn't keep up with the volume. Executions were...

Pipeline Trading Takes Anti-Algo Stand; BNY ConvergEx's ATS Stresses Choice.
March 12, 2007... Going against the grain of other dark, not-publicly-quoted pools of liquidity, Pipeline Trading Systems has closed off its trading platform from algorithms and the smaller, at times "toxic," trades they power. But for Bank of New York Co....

A New Twist on Op Risk Wins Converts, Critics: Amber turns the tables' on assessments-and how it gets paid.
March 12, 2007... Hedge fund rating programs that assess operational risk-as opposed to market and credit risk-are a business opportunity whose time has come. That's the assessment of Reiko Nahum, founder of consulting firm Amber Partners. The year-old firm...

Adaptive Instinct.
March 12, 2007... Though an open secret for some time, Bank of America officially announced its ninth and latest algorithmic offering, focused on small- and mid-cap stocks and programmed to adjust to changing conditions as would a human trader. In the Oct. 30,...

ClusterSeven Alliance.(alliance with Numerix Corp.)(Brief article)
March 12, 2007... ClusterSeven, a London-based provider of spreadsheet management and control software for large enterprises, has entered into an alliance with derivatives technology company NumeriX that they say will make it easier to assess, structure, price...

Derivatives Payback.
March 12, 2007... Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. (DTCC) said that volume on its Deriv-Serv over-the-counter processing platform nearly tripled last year, to 2.6 million transactions, and it is giving a total of $3 million in rebates to customers. The system...

Exchange Board.
March 12, 2007... Nasdaq Stock Market recently announced the first slate of member representatives of the Nasdaq Exchange-formally Nasdaq Stock Market LLC-that was registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Jan. 13, 2006. Elected to one-year terms...

People in the News.
March 12, 2007... Gresham Computing, a London-based specialist in real-time banking software and storage systems, has opened a regional headquarters in New York and put Gary Gibbs in charge. As EVP for North America-where Gresham has technology centers in...

Global Positioning on AML.
March 12, 2007... Though well aware of the global threats that prompted a tightening of anti-money-laundering (AML) enforcement in the current decade, financial institutions on a day-to-day basis tend to view their compliance activities as just that-a set of...

McCreevy: Bolder, Global Actions to Come.
March 12, 2007... One of the world's most influential financial regulators, the European Union's Charlie McCreevy, talked up financial-sector globalization and international accounting and market-structure reforms in a series of appearances in the U.S. last...

Treasury Counsel Freis Tapped as FinCEN Director.
March 12, 2007... U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson named James H. Freis director of the department's anti-money-laundering arm, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). Freis is the unit's third chief in little over a year and the fourth in...

AML Agency Releases Guidelines for Electronic Filings: Treasury's FinCEN and IRS in accord for transmissions to Detroit center.
March 12, 2007... The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), the anti-money-laundering enforcement arm of the Treasury Department, has released new specifications for electronic filing of Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) reports over a Web-based system linked to...

Institutions and Retailization' Share Hedge Fund Forum Spotlight.
March 12, 2007... The global hedge fund industry will attract $500 billion in new institutional assets by 2010, representing 65 percent of total inflows, Kevin Quirk, founding partner of Darien, Conn. consulting firm Casey Quirk & Associates, said at the...

Morgan's Neovest Adds Hidden Liquidity: In bid for differentiation, electronic platform links to 16 dark pools.
March 12, 2007... The number of dark pools and crossing networks has doubled to more than 40 in the past year, and JP Morgan Chase & Co.'s Neovest execution management system (EMS) is touting connectivity to 16 of them. The platform linked to only one or two...

Salesforce.com, Wooing Wealth Advisers, Snags Merrill Lynch.
March 12, 2007... Fresh from selling a new, wealth management-focused version of its customer relationship management (CRM) software to Merrill Lynch & Co., Salesforce.com is aiming to expand its customer base on Wall Street and beyond. On Feb. 27, when the...

Dow Jones Announces Algo Trading Product.
March 12, 2007... Strengthening its case for supporting the split-second informational needs of algorithmic trading systems, Dow Jones & Co. has introduced Elementized News Feed. It described as ultra-fast, innovative data for delivery directly into...

Are Wires Crossed on Cross-border Reporting?
March 12, 2007... The decision of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) to have firms report cross-border wire transfers has the potential to become the biggest anti-money-laundering (AML) compliance initiative since the USA Patriot Act was passed in...

Taking Government Watch Lists Private: Financial firms go in-house and to vendors to fill a data gap.
March 12, 2007... Section 1006 of the USA Patriot Act of 2001 mandated that "not later than 90 days" after the law was enacted, the State Department was to have established a money laundering watch list that "identifies individuals worldwide who are known or...

AML Law for Venture Capitalists Still Under Study at FinCEN.
March 12, 2007... In September 2002, the Treasury Department's anti-money-laundering (AML) enforcement arm, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), determined that private equity funds, including venture capital, weren't risky enough to be subject to...

ICE Puts a Crimp in Chicago Derivatives Consolidation Plans: Energy exchange says it will preserve CBOT's position.
March 19, 2007... IntercontinentalExchange (ICE) added another element, in the form of a hostile takeover bid, to the continuing consolidation shuffle among the world's financial and commodity markets. With a stock offer that it valued last week at $9.9 billion...

E-Trade Offers Global E-trading at Retail Level.
March 19, 2007... Though starting small, E-Trade Financial Corp. has ambitious plans for bringing cross-border trading services, now mainly within reach only of institutions, down to the individual investor. The New York-based online bank and brokerage on...

Reducing Margins, Canadian Style: Collateral varies by volatility, though only for equities.
March 19, 2007... As the date for portfolio margin accounts approaches in the U.S., the Investment Dealers Association of Canada (IDA) is methodically rolling out regulations designed to align margin-account requirements more closely with risk. The IDA's...

Goldman Clearing Fined $ 2 Million: Firm didn't catch illegal short sales on Redi platform.
March 19, 2007... In a first-time enforcement action in the area of naked short selling, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced jointly with the New York Stock Exchange's self- regulatory affiliate a settlement of charges last week against Goldman...

Mashups Bring Added Dimension to Web Services: Ajax, SOA, Web 2.0 migrate from Craigslist and Google to Wall Street.
March 19, 2007... Wall Street firms for the past few years have moved to accelerate software development and reduce its costs by converting conventional computer applications to services on a network-the much-embraced service-oriented architecture (SOA). These...

BT Radianz Lowers New York-Area Latency.
March 19, 2007... A new high-speed network from BT Group's financial industry extranet operator, BT Radianz, will give firms in the New York metropolitan area access to ultra-low-latency connectivity to exchanges and brokerages. The service, Radianz Ultra...

Exchange Derivative Firsts.
March 19, 2007... At the Futures Industry Association conference in Boca Raton, Fla. last week, Eurex CEO Andreas Preuss reported "strong interest in the market" for the credit derivatives products that the Frankfurt-based exchange will be introducing March 27....

Z/Yen to Aon.
March 19, 2007... The market intelligence business of Z/Yen, a consulting firm particularly active in the U.K. financial community and influential on such issues as anti-money laundering and best-execution trading analysis (Securities Industry News, April 3,...

Lehman and Shaw.
March 19, 2007... The March 13 announcement that Lehman Brothers Holdings has acquired a 20 percent stake in renowned quantitative hedge fund DE Shaw Group paired two of the most sophisticated technology operators around Wall Street. Lehman, though falling below...

People In The News.(Advanced Equities Financial Corp. appointed Steve Krameisen )(Americas' Central Securities Depositories Association appointed Mary Ann Callahan)(Institute for Financial Markets appointed Paul Saltzman )
March 19, 2007... Advanced Equities Financial Corp. (AEFC) of Chicago has hired Steve Krameisen from MetLife as chief technology officer. He is responsible for IT across four subsidiaries-First Allied Securities, FFP Securities, Greenbook Financial Services and...

Paulson's Realism on China.(Company overview)
March 19, 2007... Noting that he has "focused intensely on China from the day I became Treasury secretary," Henry Paulson returned to that country this month and delivered a major address on its financial markets and their process of modernization. In December,...

Grading the Data Management Industry: Citigroup data czar gives an A for effort, lower scores on results.
March 19, 2007... Financial services companies have come a long way in understanding the need for efficient data management. Experts attending the Financial Information Management Association's (Fima) 2007 reference data management conference in New York last...

Preparing for the NYSE Hybrid Market, Rosenblatt Hires People.
March 19, 2007... As the New York Stock Exchange rolls out its Hybrid Market, integrating its floor trading with electronic executions, agency brokerage Rosenblatt Securities has taken the contrarian step of hiring floor brokers from a former competitor while...

Nasdaq Allows Shorter Symbols.
March 19, 2007... Brand identity is a common strategic theme throughout the business world, and now it is a point of competitive contention between stock exchanges. The Nasdaq Stock Market sought to make a marketing splash last week when it not only attracted...

NYSE Proposes Floor-Broker Access To Away Markets.
March 26, 2007... In an acknowledgement of electronic-trading and market-integration realities, the New York Stock Exchange is proposing that traders on its floor be able to access markets away from the exchange to execute orders in listed stocks. An NYSE...

Options Pilot Having Anticipated Effects: Tightening of spreads is good news--for some.
March 26, 2007... Two months since options markets, with the support of the Securities and Exchange Commission, began their test of penny pricing increments, analyses of bid-ask spreads and liquidity suggest that some of the regulators' goals are being met, for...

Interactive Data Wins Patent for Fair-Value Pricing.
March 26, 2007... Interactive Data Corp. is the latest to claim a place on the business-method patent bandwagon, saying last week that its pricing and reference data business has obtained one from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for a fair-value pricing...

Corporate Actions Vendor Challenges London Exchange.
March 26, 2007... With Corporate Actions Bulletin, a service introduced last week, Exchange Data International (EDI) is taking on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) and what it characterizes as "restrictive policies" that drove up the cost of the exchange's data....

Turret Maker IPC Gains Ground in Asia.(IPC Systems)
March 26, 2007... Since last December, New York-based trading floor technology company IPC Systems has announced four major customer wins--and three of those have been in Asia. Aside from ING Group, which announced last week that is has upgraded its New York...

Head of Citigroup Transaction Unit Tapped for RBS Post.(appointment of Ellen Alemany, as chief executive officer of Royal Bank of Scotland America)
March 26, 2007... Royal Bank of Scotland Group announced Friday the appointment of Ellen Alemany as CEO of RBS America in a move to unify the U.K. banking giant's U.S. management structure. Alemany, a 30-year veteran of the global banking business, was most...

Market Standings.(London financial center ranked ahead of New York, using Global Financial Centers Index)(Report)
March 26, 2007... Critics who claim that the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and other rules are dampening U.S. financial markets' global competitiveness got fuel for their argument last week with publication of a 60-page study that ranked the London financial center ahead...

CME's E-option.
March 26, 2007... Amid the ruckus of IntercontinentalExchange's challenge to its planned merger with the Chicago Board of Trade, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) last Wednesday announced what it called "significant technology upgrades" that will make it...

Traders of the Future.(Brian Eckerly, Ohio State University student, won $100,000, Collegiate Trading Olympiad sponsored by Interactive Brokers)(Brief article)
March 26, 2007... Brian Eckerly, a student at Ohio State University, won $100,000 in the Collegiate Trading Olympiad sponsored by Interactive Brokers, which puts up $400,000 in cash prizes to help generate interest among technology-savvy students in financial...

IT's Biggest Security Threat? Look Inside.(Report)
March 26, 2007... What is today's biggest information technology security threat? IT itself, according to recent research. To begin with, an IDC report, "Privileged Password Management," finds that enterprises rank insider sources as their top security threat....

Straddling the Regulatory Worlds.
March 26, 2007... As head of regulatory services at Qumas in London, Kevin Ludwick has a European perspective on compliance issues in the securities industry. Before joining the compliance software company last year, Ludwick spent over 20 years in London as a...

FSA Risk Recommendation: Prepare for Stresses.
March 26, 2007... Each year the U.K.'s Financial Services Authority (FSA) publishes the Financial Risk Outlook, a detailed narrative that ranges from the global economic outlook and market performance to the safety and soundness of financial institutions,...

New Ticker Plant Feature: Exclusivity: Exegy, on its own after a merger fell through, says limiting customer base will ensure low latency.
March 26, 2007... Months since abandoning a takeover of Chicago market-data systems vendor HyperFeed Technologies, Exegy said that it is limiting its offering of a new managed ticker plant service to 21 clients. The firms will not receive preferential pricing...

China Reforms and Opens Up Futures Trading.
March 26, 2007... The Chinese government will begin accepting applications from brokerage firms on April 15 to trade financial futures, and it said it intends to gradually allow foreign brokerages to enter the market. Currently, the only futures trading in the...

Omgeo Expands Roles of Three Executives.
March 26, 2007... Trade management services provider Omgeo said last week that it had promoted Timothy Keady to managing director of global sales and relationship management, while broadening the assignments of two already at the managing director level--Lee...

Xenomorph and NumeriX Address Derivatives Complexity.
March 26, 2007... Xenomorph, a London-based specialist in data management technology, announced a partnership with NumeriX, a provider of cross-asset, derivatives pricing systems. As a result, according to NumeriX president and COO Steve O'Hanlon, his firm's...

Streaming in Tongues: Standard languages and benchmarks are lacking, but vendors are successfully pushing the speed envelope.
March 26, 2007... From their introduction in the 1970s, relational database management systems set a standard in enterprise computing and helped make Oracle and Sybase the technology brand names that they are. But relational databases weren't fast enough...

Grids: the New Back Office: Resource-sharing technology becomes entrenched in enterprise infrastructure.
March 26, 2007... In a few short years, grid computing has matured from the experimentation stage into an important, enterprise-level information technology utility that has been embraced by Wall Street in its typical early-adopter fashion. Firms are applying...

Do High Performance and Low Power Go Together?
March 26, 2007... Since at least the mid 1990s, Wall Street has used a new generation of high-performance computing (HPC) configurations to run tasks such as Monte Carlo simulations. But until very recently, the physical limitations of semiconductor technology...

Virtualization Helps Boost Data Center Efficiency.
March 26, 2007... For a sense of the magnitude of the securities industry's computing demands, listen to Gene Peters, director of information services for the Philadelphia Stock Exchange. "We're talking 60,000 to 70,000 transactions per second for our...

Blades Carve Out a Niche in the Data Center: In tandem with virtualization, technology addresses capacity and energy concerns.
March 26, 2007... When Vern Brownell left his job as chief technology officer at Goldman Sachs & Co. in 2000, he had a fairly modest goal: Start a company that would manufacture servers that reduced what he saw as the "incredible" complexity of most data...