Securities Industry News articles from October 2007

Securities Industry News archives from October 2007

BDFS to First Clearing.
October 1, 2007... In an effort to further its rapid growth and provide its advisers with a powerful planning tool, Broker Dealer Financial Services Corp. (BDFS), a Johnston, Iowa-based brokerage and advisory firm, recently completed its conversion to Wachovia...

BATS Stays Aggressive.(BATS Trading)
October 1, 2007... Finding success capturing listed market share during its September fee special, BATS Trading has decided to maintain an aggressive pricing schedule for those shares through at least year-end. Starting Oct. 1, BATS will charge $0.0024 per share...

Security Spending Up, Data Leakage Down: Deloitte.
October 1, 2007... Identity and access management--the business of ensuring that only authorized personnel and partners have access to company data--is the number-one security concern among financial services firms, according to a survey from Deloitte Touche...

Little Red Riding Hood Was Neglected.(information management in financial services)
October 1, 2007... Something occurred to me recently when I was reading "Little Red Riding Hood" to my children: Her mother was negligent. She sent a six-year-old girl alone out into a forest, knowing full well that there was danger lurking beyond the safety of...

Building on Cross-border Relationships.
October 1, 2007... When Jonathan Auerbach and David Grayson founded agency brokerage Auerbach Grayson & Co. in 1993, e-mail was not a fixture in the business world, the Internet had not yet evolved into a sophisticated source of global, real-time information and...

People In The News.
October 1, 2007... Trade Settlement (TSI), a global provider of electronic settlement services for the primary and secondary syndicated loan markets, has made Stuart Biggar general manager of its newly opened Dublin office. Biggar is a 20-year veteran of Merrill...

The Era of Experimentation~Vendors must work together to get the most out of HPC, say conference panelists.(Conference news)(Discussion)
October 1, 2007... The capabilities of high-performance computing (HPC)--the breathtaking speed, the ability to handle massive volumes of data--often collide with the practical limitations of making the hardware, applications and operating system all work...

New Algo Platform Pairs IBM's Cells, Red Hat's Linux.
October 1, 2007... IBM Corp. has launched an algorithmic trading platform in partnership with open-source software provider Red Hat that combines the speed of IBM's Cell processors with Red Hat's commercial Linux operating system for ease of implementation. ...

Ahead of ISE Merger, Deutsche Borse Upgrades Systems.(International Securities Exchange)
October 1, 2007... As it upgrades its systems to optimize trade messaging speeds and cut latency, Deutsche Borse is building a "socket" interface that will enable more-direct connectivity and easier integration with the customized trading applications of...

FIX Protocol Nearing an Algorithmic Standard~Will end of beta test be quick enough for fast-changing market?
October 1, 2007... FIX Protocol Ltd. (FPL) has taken steps toward the final roll-out of an extensible markup language (XML) specification that will support advanced algorithmic trading. Currently in beta mode, a full-blown release is expected by year-end. ...

China Completes Brokerage Cleanup.
October 1, 2007... Chinese regulators said that they have completed a three-year overhaul of the country's brokerage industry in which 19 firms were shut down and misused funds returned to investors. The China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) said that...

A New World Order~Consolidation and expansion of services leave little room for smaller custodians.(Company overview)
October 1, 2007... In the wake of a pair of mega-mergers earlier this year, the securities services industry is bracing for another wave of consolidation. Bank of New York Co.'s merger in July with Mellon Financial Corp. and State Street Corp.'s acquisition of...

Fund Servicing in Flu~Panel of experts cite processing, staffing and valuation concerns.(Discussion)
October 1, 2007... Stability is not a hallmark of today's hedge fund administration business. Competitors have been piling into the crowded fund-servicing field even as consolidation thins the ranks, and funds' growing hunger for exotic instruments has given rise...

Target2 Debate Heats Up~Critics of ECB's settlement plan see threat to local custodians, overstated cost savings.
October 1, 2007... The debate over the future of Europe's clearing and settlement infrastructure continues to heat up following the publication of a recent white paper co-authored by ranking officials from Europe's two largest agent banks. Much of the...

Asian Custodians Expand Services, Geographic Reach.
October 1, 2007... Custodian banks have historically focused on the business of safeguarding assets for their clients. In recent years, however, clients have asked custodians to offer a variety of complex securities services, ranging from financial accounting to...

Is Swift at a Crossroads?
October 1, 2007... The official theme of this week's annual Swift Sibos conference is "Gaining Momentum," which the banking and securities industry consortium says "will serve as a platform to discuss how the financial industry can speed up implementation of...

Citing AML Vulnerabilities, Industry Groups Seek Enhanced Cover Payments Transparency.
October 1, 2007... Even with anti-money-laundering (AML) regulations in place across much of the globe, there are still basic transactions that many observers fear are vulnerable to money launderers. Growing concerns have caused two industry groups to call for...

Hackers Up the Ante, Network Protectors Respond~Security specialists use unified, intelligent systems to thwart attacks.
October 1, 2007... Once a hobby popular with teenagers, hacking has evolved into a multinational, multibillion-dollar industry that utilizes ever-more sophisticated techniques to penetrate companies' information technology security systems. Targeted cyberattacks...

Market Structure Weathers Flood of Message Traffic.
October 1, 2007... Unexpected equity-market volatility and new regulatory requirements have combined this year to give headaches to market centers as they generate and take in record levels of message traffic. There have been bumps in the road, but no potholes...

Danger From Within.
October 1, 2007... When hackers prey on corporate targets, they often have assistance from partners on the inside, says Ellen Libenson, VP of product management at Agoura Hills, Calif.-based Symark International--a trend that is only "just starting to get...

Multitude of Benefits Beneath Surface ofNasdaq Deal for BSE.(Company overview)
October 8, 2007... When Nasdaq Stock Market agreed to acquire BSE Group, the holding company of the Boston Stock Exchange, a move driven in part by new regulatory requirements, it opened up a series of opportunities for the second-largest U.S. exchange. One has...

Could Analytics Have Averted Credit Crisis?Downturn has firms reevaluating risk control, analysis tools.
October 8, 2007... As the credit crunch and subprime mortgage problems continue to cloud financial markets, some securities industry observers are asking whether technology, in the form of risk control and analytics, could have been used more wisely to prevent...

Corporate Actions, Central RepositoriesDominate Data Management Discussions~Sibos panelists cite intra-, inter-company cooperation.(Conference news)
October 8, 2007... While regulatory, cost and operational pressures have made accurate enterprisewide data a priority for operations executives, achieving it is no easy task, according to panelists who had ample advice for delegates at Swifts annual Sibos...

OTC Market in Need of STP.
October 8, 2007... Recent stock market volatility has drawn attention to systemic processing flaws and a lack of transparency in the credit derivatives and structured products markets, said panelists at Swifts Sibos conference last week in Boston. Investment...

SEC: Too Early To Make Penny Pilot Changes.
October 8, 2007... In its approval to proceed with the pilot test of penny-increment pricing for options, issued Sept. 28, the Securities and Exchange Commission countered arguments made by a major options market maker that the test should be slowed down and the...

Albridge Signs Clearer.
October 8, 2007... Correspondents of First Southwest Co.s clearing arm will be able to utilize Albridge Solutions data aggregation technology via the clearers workstation, the companies announced last week. The Albridge application will aggregate data from assets...

Merrill Algos on RealTick.
October 8, 2007... An alliance between Merrill Lynch & Co. and Chicago-based trading technology company Townsend Analytics will allow users of the latters multibroker RealTick execution management system to access Merrills algorithmic trading strategies and...

Swift Cuts Prices.(Brief article)
October 8, 2007... The Swift messaging cooperative unveiled a set of price cuts at its annual Sibos conference last week. High-volume customerswho account for 80 percent of all Swift messaging traffic will be able to sign three-year contracts, effective Jan. 1,...

Portware Adds Product Strategy Unit, Four Execs.(appointment of Jim Feingold, Harrell Smith, Bill James and Steve Hovagimyan)
October 8, 2007... Portware has strengthened its management team with four executive appointments, said the New York-based company last month. Two of the hires will run the execution management systems (EMS) providers newly created product strategy group, which...

The Pain Isn't Over.(Steve Marsh and Robert Tymoczko on hedge funds)
October 8, 2007... Steve Marsh and his partner Robert Tymoczko first noticed large stock-price swings20 percent to 30 percentamong small-cap stocks in the U.S. and in Europe, devoid of jarring news to justify them. The investment veterans, who manage...

For Investors, Product Complexity Doesn't Excuse Losses.
October 8, 2007... The International Swaps & Derivatives Association (ISDA) last month said, in its twice-annual survey, that outstanding credit derivatives rose to $45.46 trillion in notional value in the first half of 2007, up 32 percent from year-end 2006. But...

News-Driven Algos Get Boost From Dow Jones, RavenPack.
October 8, 2007... A partnership between Dow Jones and RavenPack, a provider of news analytics that utilize the power of supercomputers, has produced a developers kit that speeds up the process of creating and employing news-oriented quantitative models for...

Omgeo Connects to BBH's Infomediary Messaging Platform.
October 8, 2007... The buy side will soon have a consolidated view of the post-trade life cycle, thanks to a partnership between Omgeo and Brown Brothers Harriman (BBH). Fund managers will be able to link to both the Omgeo Connect trade allocation and matching...

CBOE Proposes Increased Flexibility for Credit Default Options.
October 8, 2007... In an apparent effort to widen the market for its recently launched credit default options, the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) last month submitted a proposal to the Securities and Exchange Commission to lower the minimum investment...

Exchange Membership Gives Instinet Access to Australia.
October 8, 2007... The Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) has granted full membership to agency brokerage Instinet, effective immediately, a status that allows the firm to offer directly its global execution services to the countrys financial institutions. ...

Nasdaq and NYSE Get Go-Ahead to Open Offices in China.
October 8, 2007... Nasdaq Stock Market has been granted approval to open an office in Beijing, just weeks after the Chinese Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) gave the New York Stock Exchange the green light. The CSRC, in a statement, said that Nasdaq will...

London Still Leads.(Brief article)
October 15, 2007... When the first Global Financial Centers Index (GFCI) rating was released in March, it placed London in the top spot, ahead of New York, giving ammunition to critics who say that the Sarbanes-Oxley Act has crippled the U.S. financial markets'...

Euroclear Eases Russian Access.
October 15, 2007... Expanding on a memorandum of understanding (MOU) signed in April, members of the National Depository Center (NDC) of Russia will now be able to settle transactions and safekeep international securities with Euroclear Bank through NDC's account...

Emissions Trading on Eurex.
October 15, 2007... Frankfurt-based derivatives exchange Eurex is partnering with Leipzig, Germany's European Energy Exchange (EEX) to offer carbon dioxide emissions trading. Eurex is the largest shareholder, with a 23 percent stake, in EEX, which offers spot and...

People in the News.
October 15, 2007... Agency brokerage Instinet has named John Comerford EVP and global head of trading research. Comerford joins New York-based Instinet, which was purchased in February by Nomura Holdings, from the parent company's Nomura Securities International...

Risk Management in the Algo Trading Equation.
October 15, 2007... The recent and continuing growth of algorithmic trading marks a fundamental change in the markets, one where the effects will be felt deeper as new markets and asset classes go electronic. With all the attention to algorithmic trading, risk...

Venues Proliferate, Brokers Consolidate~Tabb survey finds buy side frustrated by fragmentation, pleased with CSAs.
October 15, 2007... In their never-ending search for new liquidity venues, equity traders have made dark pools and crossing networks de rigeur. But now, according to a new study, the buy side is frustrated with the dispersion of liquidity and is voicing a desire...

A Kinder, Gentler SRO?
October 15, 2007... NASD and NYSE Regulation--the self-regulatory organizations (SROs) that combined in July to form the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (Finra)--brought fewer cases and imposed smaller fines in 2006 than the year prior, according to a new...

Cash, Credit and Confidence.(Company overview)
October 15, 2007... The official theme at Swift's Sibos conference this month in Boston--Gaining Momentum--resonated with Kenneth Lewis, chairman and CEO of Bank of America, who, in a keynote address, said that he hopes such momentum extends to credit markets....

3D Markets Introduces Options Execution Benchmark.
October 15, 2007... Start-up 3D Markets, which is bringing the alternative trading system concept into the options business, will also be introducing a benchmark akin to volume-weighted average price (VWAP) in equities. It is scheduled to launch shortly after 3D...

NSX Inverts Pricing on Exchange-Traded Funds.
October 15, 2007... In the latest salvo in an ongoing fee battle among market centers, the National Stock Exchange (NSX) said last week that it has implemented an inverted pricing schedule for exchange-traded funds (ETFs), a move that echoes the pricing strategy...

Swift-Led Messaging Initiative Automates Fund of Hedge Funds Communications.
October 15, 2007... The fund of hedge funds community will take a major step toward automating communications between custodian banks, administrators and transfer agents with the launch next year of a new set of Swift message formats. Over the past year,...

Prospectus Problems Hit Bulge Bracket~NYSE fines firms $10.4 million.
October 15, 2007... Familiar bulge-bracket names such as Citigroup, Goldman Sachs & Co. and UBS are among the 15 firms that were fined a total of $10.4 million by NYSE Regulation for alleged prospectus-delivery failures and other operational and supervisory...

Will Financial Firms Have a Second Life?
October 15, 2007... Virtual reality platforms may still be in their infancy, but brokerages and other financial institutions are already using electronic worlds such as Second Life to hold meetings, give seminars and test marketing techniques. Securities trading...

Upstart To Launch Portal for Illiquid Assets.
October 15, 2007... Following several large Wall Street firms that have introduced venues for the trading of unregistered securities, a closely held independent firm is launching an online forum that allows users to exchange indications of interest (IOIs) for...

TradeWeb Reaches Across Asset Classes Dealer investment furthers Thomson platform's aims to become one-stop shop.
October 15, 2007... A $280 million investment in Thomson TradeWeb by nine of the world's biggest banks will create the largest multi-asset-class trading platform for asset managers and hedge funds, said the Thomson Financial unit last week. Already the...

Will Broker-Dealers Get AML Exam Manual?
October 15, 2007... When NASD and the member regulation division of the New York Stock Exchange combined this summer to form the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (Finra), it produced a self-regulatory organization (SRO) powerhouse, with oversight over...

TransactTools Adds BATS.
October 22, 2007... Order routing service provider NYSE TransactTools, a subsidiary of NYSE Euronext, is offering connectivity to the BATS Trading electronic communications network (ECN). The TransactTools network is linked to all securities exchanges in the U.S....

Radianz Hosts Chi-X.
October 22, 2007... BT Group has agreed to provide Chi-X Europe, agency brokerage Instinet's pan-European alternative trading system (ATS), with secure hosting and low-latency connectivity through the Proximity solution from its financial extranet operator, BT...

People in the News.
October 22, 2007... Sophis, a cross-asset-class, front-to-back portfolio and risk management software provider, has named Eric Bernstein as COO for North America and Philippe Stephan as global head of business development. Both will work in New York and report to...

MiFID: In With a Whimper?(Markets in Financial Instruments Directive )
October 22, 2007... Less than two weeks before the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID)--the cornerstone of the European Union's efforts to create a single financial market--becomes effective, it appears that the initiative will cause less of a...

PHLX Sees Role for Exchanges in Assisting ATSs~ECNs look to regionals for multiple display facilities.
October 22, 2007... The Philadelphia Stock Exchange (PHLX) is exploring ways that electronic communications networks (ECNs) and other alternative trading systems (ATSs) can utilize the exchange, a move that follows other exchanges' efforts to allow ECNs to quote...

Egenera Slims Down Data Centers~Firms cut costs, maintenance with virtualized servers.
October 22, 2007... As space- and power-hogging hardware overruns data centers, financial services firms are increasingly turning to technology from virtualization specialists such as Marlboro, Mass.-based Egenera. Server virtualization, which reduces...

National Regulation, Globalized Markets.
October 22, 2007... As global markets become more and more intertwined, issues arise from the differing perspectives and rules of national regulatory regimes--conflicting financial reporting standards and Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the U.S., to name...

JonesTrading: A Human Light Pool'.(JonesTrading Institutional Services)(Company overview)
October 22, 2007... Founded in 1975, agency brokerage JonesTrading Institutional Services refers to itself as the "oldest and largest execution-only firm." Experience claims aside, JonesTrading prides itself on a business model that it says can locate liquidity in...

FSTC Op Risk Benchmarking Project Enters Final Phase~Focus shifts to refining, testing resiliency engineering methodology.
October 22, 2007... The Financial Services Technology Consortium (FSTC) has moved into the final phase of an industry resiliency initiative to develop benchmarks and standards for operational risk management. The new phase, which began last month, focuses on...

SEC's Redemption Fee Rule Goes Live~Unexpected charges could spark concerns.
October 22, 2007... The Securities and Exchange Commission's Rule 22c-2, or the redemption-fee rule, became effective last week, after two extensions of last year's Oct. 16 deadline--but the consequences for mutual funds and their intermediaries are far from...

Investors Find Passage to India~In emerging-economy competition, India is seeing rapid expansion.
October 22, 2007... India, rich in history and tradition, has not always been rich in other ways. But the country's emerging-market status is on the rise due to a strong infrastructure, advanced technology, institutional investor confidence and a growing set of...

LiquidityHub Gives New Look To Institutional E-bond Trading~Streaming protocol offers alternative to TradeWeb RFQ.
October 22, 2007... Multidealer e-bond trading system LiquidityHub launches today, offering euro interest-rate swaps liquidity from the platform's broker-dealer owners via a format new to institutional fixed-income trading: the request-for-stream (RFS) protocol....

Light' Swift Will Ease Adoption~Scaled-down interface to appeal to low-volume users.
October 22, 2007... A new, light-weight interface being developed by Swift is expected to attract low-volume, low-value users to its messaging network. Plans for the as-yet-unnamed SwiftNet interface were unveiled by CEO Lazaro Campos at Swift's Sibos...

Finra Says Portfolio Margin Accounts Can Include Convertibles.
October 22, 2007... Portfolio margin accounts, which in December expanded to include equities, are now on track to add convertible bonds, a step toward bringing more fixed-income products into the higher-leverage accounts. It has been widely expected that the...

NYSE Partners With Banks on Block-Trading ATS in Europe.
October 29, 2007... NYSE Euronext, BNP Paribas and HSBC are teaming up to create a multilateral trading facility (MTF) that will enable execution of block trades of European listed stocks. The new MTF, Project SmartPool, will have access to all European...

Ofac Moves to Increase Transparency~Global exchange mergers add regulatory complexity.
October 29, 2007... The Treasury Department's office of foreign assets control (Ofac) is seeking to increase the transparency of its sanctions process--in part as a response to recent cross-border exchange mergers--and provide enhanced risk guidelines for...

Live From New York, It's STAC's New Lab~Firms choose not to test proprietary technology, but individual components are ripe for benchmarking.
October 29, 2007... The Securities Technology Analysis Center (STAC) this summer opened a testing facility in New York. A presence in Manhattan is eminently sensible for a company that evaluates and benchmarks technology for capital markets trading, but it raises...

Clearstream Advocates European Investment Funds Automation.
October 29, 2007... A recent report on inefficiencies in the processing of cross-border transactions in the European investment funds industry has brought increased attention to the potential benefits of unifying participants under a single automated system. ...

Mandatory Arbitration Under Fire~Sifma defends status quo against legislative action.
October 29, 2007... In the face of Congressional calls for change, the Securities & Financial Markets Association (Sifma) has issued a white paper strongly defending the securities arbitration system, particularly the use of pre-dispute mandatory arbitration...

Finra Opens Gateway.
October 29, 2007... The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (Finra) has introduced an online portal designed to help member firms meet their compliance and regulatory reporting obligations. The Web-based suite of compliance applications, Firm Gateway,...

MOUs Pile Up.
October 29, 2007... The latest in a seemingly never-ending series of cooperative agreements between exchanges, Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange and the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) last week announced that they had signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU)...

Chi-X on NeoNet.(Brief article)
October 29, 2007... Agency brokerage NeoNet has added Instinet's pan-European alternative trading system Chi-X to the roster of global exchanges to which it offers customers direct-market access (DMA). It is Stockholm-based NeoNet's first link to a European...

People in the News.
October 29, 2007... Westborough, Mass.-based research firm Tabb Group has opened an outpost in London and placed Andrew Howieson in charge as partner and managing director. Howieson, a native of England and since 2005 the director in Europe of Burlington,...

The Value of BSA Filings.(Bank Secrecy Act)
October 29, 2007... When James Freis took over as director of the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) in March, he inherited a paperwork problem: a flood of suspicious activity reports (SARs) and currency transaction reports (CTRs)....

A MiFID Identity Crisis?
October 29, 2007... Implementation of the European Union's Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID) is days away, yet financial firms are still working out how to identify exchange-listed derivatives in post-trade transaction reports to regulators. ...

BondDesk Appoints New CEO, Reports Record Volumes.
October 29, 2007... BondDesk Group has named Peter Crosbie CEO, with predecessor Robert Slaymaker shifting into a more strategic, non-executive chairman role. The move comes after the retail fixed-income platform announced strong third-quarter results, with total...

Investment Research: Fewer Analysts, More Automation~TowerGroup study: buy-, sell-side technology demands growing.
October 29, 2007... Cutting-edge technology is catching on in the investment research business, with global buy-side spending on research-related IT expected to jump from $586 million in 2007 to $1.1 billion in 2010, according to a new study from research firm...

Capital IQ: Mobile and in Real Time.
October 29, 2007... Standard & Poor's subsidiary Capital IQ, a provider of Web-based financial data and analysis tools, has gone mobile. The New York-based company has reconfigured its platform for small-screen viewing and made its repository of online data...

Healthier Markets To Emerge From Subprime Crisis.
October 29, 2007... Though the U.S. mortgage industry has received the lion's share of blame for recent difficulties in the global financial markets, Federal Reserve Board chairman Ben Bernanke, in remarks before the Economic Club of New York on Oct. 15, suggested...