Get your nominations ready for the highly competitive FTF News Technology Innovation Awards 2022 — now in its 12th year — presented by Financial Technologies Forum and the FTF News service. Since 2011, FTF has celebrated and recognized the professionals, financial technology vendors, service providers, industry bodies, regulators, and other industry participants that have made… Read More >>
House Passes Bill to Fix ‘Tough’ LIBOR Contracts
Bill Would Ease the Way to SOFR In a rare act of bipartisanship, the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed legislation intended to ease the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) transition for “markets, investors, and consumers” with what’s known as “tough legacy contracts” — incumbent agreements that will end without a designated reference rate. The… Read More >>
Key Groups Push to Start T+1 in 2024
The goalpost for the move by U.S. equities markets from T+2 to the shorter T+1 settlement cycle has shifted from 2023 to the first half of 2024 after an outreach to the industry revealed that more time was needed to revamp and test systems, workflows, and operations to facilitate this fundamental change to securities transaction processing…. Read More >>
SEC Sought ISITC’s Advice on T+1: Q&A
(FTF News recently spoke with Lisa Iagatta, the ISITC chair for the past three years, as ISITC’s Virtual Fall Forum 2021, held earlier this month, was winding down. Iagatta touched on the T+1 shorter settlement cycle push, led by the DTCC, SIFMA, and the ICI, and looked back at her time at the helm, which… Read More >>
Crypto Firms Face Many AML Challenges: Q&A
(A cryptocurrency trading platform, Voyager Digital Ltd., recently announced that it is using anti-money laundering (AML) solutions from NICE Actimize. Voyager has signed onto the cloud-based AML Essentials offerings and will be using the Suspicious Activity Monitoring and Customer Due Diligence applications to monitor its operations. The news gave FTF News an opportunity to reach… Read More >>
Asset Managers Want Enterprise-Wide ESG: Survey
The securities industry wants to fully integrate environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) concerns across the enterprise and into decision-making processes if the emerging, relevant data and solutions can facilitate those goals. This is according to the ESG Global Survey 2021 that BNP Paribas conducted and just released. The BNP Paribas survey, based on interviews… Read More >>
Corporate Actions Ops Are Stuck in Manual: Survey
But Firms Want Real-Time Corporate Actions Data A new report based on survey results reveals that slightly more than “three-quarters of respondents (78 percent) still process part of their corporate actions manually, with 40 percent processing more than half of their corporate actions in this way,” according to research sponsored by data and infrastructure services… Read More >>
Westpac Could Pay $87M in Corporate Actions Remediation
Australia’s Westpac Banking Corp. has agreed to spend as much as $87 million in remediation for past corporate actions notification problems that may have caused clients to miss out on actionable information, confirm bank officials and the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC). Westpac officials initially reported to ASIC in July 2019 that there may… Read More >>
RJO Relaunches & Fills President’s Post
RJO Promotes Staniford to President Chicago-based R.J. O’Brien & Associates (RJO), which is generally regarded as the oldest and largest independent futures brokerage and clearing firm in the United States, reports that Daniel Staniford has been named president. Staniford will “act on behalf of RJO and all of its global affiliates and related entities, including… Read More >>
CME Slated to Oversee Forward-Looking SOFR Rates
ARRC Wants CME Group to Serve as Administrator The push to replace LIBOR advanced with the news that derivatives exchanges operator CME Group is in the lead to administer forward-looking Secured Overnight Financing Rate (SOFR) term rates. The Alternative Reference Rates Committee (ARRC), which oversees SOFR, has picked CME Group “following a robust request for proposals… Read More >>