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Asset Management Shift Inspires IT Transformation Among Middle Eastern Banks
While markets along the Persian Gulf have conspicuously built up financial infrastructure in recent years to attract foreign firms and capital, local banks elsewhere in the Middle East are bolstering their technological capacity to do precisely the…
Fund Managers Gear Up for AIFMD Costs, Compliance
With only six months to go until the July 22 deadline for fund managers to comply with the Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive, Marina Daras looks at how the industry is gearing up in the homestretch.
Derivatives Trading Firms Weigh Audio Recording Approaches
Thanks to the latest Dodd–Frank provision in which derivatives transactions will be more closely monitored, many US traders will now have their conversations recorded. Jake Thomases investigates how that recording will be done and what will happen to the…
Bohemian Rhapsody: CIO Michal Sanak Leads Prague's RSJ with Smart Speed
RSJ, tucked on the left bank of the Vltava River in the Czech capital of Prague, has quietly become one of the world’s most active proprietary trading firms, despite its boutique size. As CIO and shareholder Michal Sanak tells Tim Bourgaize Murray, the…
James Rundle: Imperfect Solutions
Most Western exchanges have implemented safety measures to mitigate share-price swings, but others are beginning to experience the algorithmic troubles that brought trading firms to their knees in recent years. Kill switches and circuit breakers don’t…
Michael Shashoua: The Way of the World
With respect to the spread of US and Euro-centric data management systems, as well as regulation to other regions, Michael points out that the difficulties in translating new standards and laws could highlight cultural differences that service providers…
License to Kill: The Complexity of Circuit Breakers
As regulators collaborate to review different concepts to protect the integrity of the US financial markets and reduce potential technology failures, Marina Daras looks at the technical challenges of implementing circuit breakers for brokers and…
Japan Eyes Further Transformation after Exchange Merger
The Japanese capital markets have undergone a series of changes over the past few years, first in response to the natural disasters that affected Asia’s regional hub, and later with the merger of the Osaka Securities Exchange and the Tokyo Stock Exchange…
AFTAs 2013: The Winners and Why They Won
It’s difficult to believe that Waters first unveiled the American Financial Technology Awards all the way back in 2005, although anyone who has worked in financial services for any length of time will appreciate the extent to which time flies in this…
AFTAs 2013: Best IT Team—BNY Mellon
There’s a reason why the best IT team category is the final announcement at the American Financial Technology Awards: It’s the highest profile, and therefore the most prized, of all 16 categories on offer. BNY Mellon’s IT team, under the tutelage of…
AFTAs 2013: Best Technology Executive, Sell-Side—Edwin Marcial, IntercontinentalExchange
Edwin Marcial joined the Continental Power Exchange, the company that would become ICE, in 1996, because he wanted to make an impression on a startup. He stayed put when it nearly went belly-up in 1999, when it became economically viable again overnight…
AFTAs 2013: Best Technology Executive, Buy-Side—Tom Miglis, Citadel
Since 2001, Tom Miglis’ steady hand has run technology at Ken Griffin’s Chicago-based Citadel Group. But despite his long tenure as CIO, Miglis wasn’t named best buy-side technology executive as a lifetime-achievement-type award, but rather because…
AFTAs 2013: Best Compliance Initiative—ConvergEx Group
Compliance and market surveillance are among the most important functions at any institutional trading firm. Given heightened regulatory scrutiny of the capital markets, that importance looks set to grow, but compliance teams often struggle with basic,…
AFTAs 2013: Best Mobile-Strategy Initiative—Morgan Stanley
Waters has written extensively in recent months about mobility and the idea that work is a thing you do, not a place you go. Firms across the industry are developing new mobile strategies, but it is Morgan Stanley’s Matrix Mobile rollout that won this…
AFTAs 2013: Best IT Integration Initiative—Bank of America Merrill Lynch
IT integration projects have an annoying habit of resembling icebergs: They might appear to be relatively rudimentary undertakings at the outset, but they invariably grow in complexity, timescale, and budget as they progress, often throwing up more…
AFTAs 2013: Most Cutting-Edge IT Initiative—Blackstone
Park Avenue-based Blackstone Group wins what is traditionally the most competitive of the 16 categories on offer in the annual American Financial Technology Awards, thanks to its BXAccess integrated investor portal, a blend of cutting-edge technology,…
AFTAs 2013: Best Cross-Asset Trading Initiative—JPMorgan
Imagine having access to the full breadth of execution services of one of the world’s most powerful banks on a single platform. It would have to include pre-trade, trade, and post-trade capabilities, as well as clearing, custody, margin, and prime…
AFTAs 2013: Best Analytics Initiative—Credit Suisse
The common refrain when it comes to data is that it’s not just important to have it—one also needs to know what questions to ask it. Enter analytics, which has become a critically important aspect of financial technology over the past few years,…
AFTAs 2013: Best Risk Management Initiative—International Securities Exchange
Execution management systems (EMSs) abound in the institutional trading space, but combining them with risk management capabilities, thereby broadening their usage from the front to the middle office, is a powerful proposition. With PrecISE, the Deutsche…
AFTAs 2013: Best Global Deployment—Instinet
It is no secret that some of the most complex and laborious technology projects in the capital markets come on the back of mergers or acquisitions—necessary evils of participating in a constantly evolving industry. It is therefore not surprising that the…
Anthony Malakian: Weathering the Next Big One
In an age where machines are core to trading strategies on the buy side, Anthony says that data and, more importantly, analytics, should be at the heart of investment in order to avoid becoming the next headline-generating failure.
James Rundle: Round Pegs, Square Holes
James takes away several key points from this year’s European Trading Architecture Summit, the most pertinent of which is that sometimes, the benefits of projects and technology initiatives are often hard to see at the start.
Michael Shashoua: Communication Breakdown
While it might have seemed that the US Fatca foreign tax compliance regulation was not getting adequate attention from firms required to comply, Michael says it now appears as though the regulators are failing to devote enough attention to its specifics…
Max Bowie: Analytics—The Next Generation of Opportunity
A new breed of predictive analytical tools is finding its way into traders’ toolkits. But, says Max, the implications for these technologies have the potential to extend much further into other areas of a data consumer’s workflow, from the type of data…