In other news, ACA Group & Foreside become one, Voya Financial has a new CISO, Leucadia works with Illuminate, and Gemini cuts staff.
SEC Green Lights Securities Financing Transaction Clearing Service
Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. (DTCC) officials report that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has given the green light to the Securities Financing Transaction (SFT) Clearing Service proposal of the National Securities Clearing Corp. (NSCC), the equity clearing subsidiary of DTCC.
The NSCC has been approved to operate “a central clearing and settlement infrastructure for overnight borrows and loans of equity securities (collectively, securities financing transactions or SFTs),” according to the DTCC.
“The new NSCC SFT Clearing Service will support the central clearing of clients’ SFTs intermediated by sponsoring members or agent clearing members as well as the central clearing of SFTs between NSCC full-service members,” according to the DTCC. “The SFT Clearing Service will also allow lenders and borrowers to submit pre-established bilaterally-settled SFTs for clearing.”
The SFT Clearing Service offers NSCC members “the ability to recognize balance sheet offsets on novated SFTs, including those with third-party NSCC members and with their institutional clients. Through novation to NSCC, members may benefit from lower capital charges on their SFTs than would otherwise be required if they engaged in the same activity outside of a central counterparty,” the DTCC says. “At the same time, Agency Lending Disclosure (ALD) reporting would no longer be applicable.”
DTCC officials add that they have been working with Broadridge Financial Solutions and Provable Markets as they “have committed to submitting transactions into the new service as Approved SFT Submitters. Both firms have established connectivity and are actively testing messaging in development. DTCC is also working with FIS (Loanet) who has committed to collaborating with Broadridge and Provable Markets … for those members who may wish to continue to leverage FIS for their books and records processing and for the submission of DTC Deliver Orders.”
ACA Group and Foreside Combine
ACA Group and Foreside Financial Group, LLC, two governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) providers to clients in the financial services industry, report the completion of their merger. According to the merged company, Foreside’s distribution business will be rebranded as ACA Foreside and will become a division under ACA.
ACA’s current CEO Shvetank Shah will be the combined entity’s CEO. Genstar Capital, a private equity firm based in San Francisco, is the lead investor in the combined business.
Genstar reports that it has approximately $35 billion of assets under management (AUM) and its investments are focused on targeted segments of the financial services, industrials, healthcare, and software industries.
Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.—L.Ch
Voya Taps Global Payments for CISO Post
Voya Financial, Inc. reports that Stacy Hughes has joined the company as senior vice president and chief information security officer (CISO).
Hughes’s mandate includes “advancing Voya’s vision and strategy for an industry-leading information security program and supporting Voya’s focus on providing products, solutions, and technologies that help Americans become well planned, well invested, and well protected. Hughes will drive alignment of Voya’s information security investments and plans to deliver leading-edge security technologies and capabilities across Voya’s enterprise infrastructure. She will lead the effort to anticipate and proactively mitigate information security risks, while also supporting business growth and innovation.”
Hughes reports to executive vice president and chief information officer Santhosh Keshavan.
As Voya continues to reimagine the future of work, Hughes will be one of many leaders practicing a hybrid-working model from Atlanta, Ga., the company says in its statement.
Hughes joins “with more than 20 years of experience leading complex IT initiatives within Fortune 500 financial technology organizations, most recently at Global Payments Inc.,” officials say.
She also has been on the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council board of advisors and in 2020 was named one of the most influential women in payments by an industry group.
Voya had $4.2 billion in revenue in 2021 and $705 billion in total assets under management and administration as of March 31, 2022, according to a statement. —L.Ch
Leucadia Partners with Illuminate Financial
Mark Beeston
Leucadia Asset Management, the asset management division of Jefferies Financial Group Inc., reports the advent of “a strategic relationship with Illuminate Financial Management, a venture capital firm that invests in companies and technologies at the forefront of the financial services industry.”
As part of the deal, Leucadia will “commit to investing in Illuminate Financial Management’s venture capital strategy,” according to a statement.
Illuminate Financial Management characterizes itself as a “thesis-driven venture capital firm dedicated to fintech and enterprise software companies building technology solutions for financial services. Existing investors from Illuminate Financial Management’s previous funds will continue as additional anchor investors in the third fund, including JP Morgan, S&P Global and Deutsche Börse Group.”
“The resources and support of the Leucadia Asset Management platform will also enable us to concentrate on finding and funding the best opportunities for our investors,” Mark Beeston, founder and managing partner of Illuminate Financial Management, says in the statement. — L.Ch
Crypto-Winter Spurs Layoffs at Gemini
Pioneering cryptocurrency exchange Gemini is cutting one-tenth of its staff due to the impacts of a “crypto winter,” according to a blog posting by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the well-known brothers who are founders of the exchange. Tyler is the CEO and Cameron is the president of Gemini.
“Fellow Astronauts — we are writing to update you on a difficult decision that will impact a number of you and the overall size of our team. … The crypto revolution is well underway and its impact will continue to be profound. … Its path can best be described as … dramatic moments of hypergrowth, followed by sharp contractions that settle down to a new equilibrium that is higher than the one before. This is where we are now, in the contraction phase that is settling into a period of stasis — what our industry refers to as ‘crypto winter,’ ” according to the blog posting.
“To that end, we have asked team leaders to ensure that they are focused only on products that are critical to our mission and assess whether their teams are right-sized for the current, turbulent market conditions that are likely to persist for some time. After much thought and consideration, we have made the difficult but necessary decision to part ways with approximately 10 percent of our workforce,” according to the posting.
“As painful as this moment is, we ultimately see it as an opportunity to double-down on our strongest ideas and customer-centric products so that we may be the catalyst of innovation coming out of these leaner times that will help fuel the next cycle of crypto growth and adoption,” according to the posting.
The full posting can be found here: https://bit.ly/3NetlTQ
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