With great trepidation, I am putting forth 10 suggested resolutions for operations in 2014. I am aiming for limited, well-defined achievable goals or at least some creative daydreaming on how to improve post-trade functions, workflows and IT in what I suspect will be an adventurous year.1.) I will automate some aspect of reconciliation or I… Read More >>
Readers Pick FATCA as Top Story for 2013
Three of the top news stories for 2013 among FTF News readers dealt with the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA). The adoption of the Volcker Rule by regulators was the second most popular story while the FIX protocol’s advances into post-trade processing also attracted lots of attention. SAC Capital’s admission of guilt also garnered… Read More >>
BNY Mellon to Use Markit as SWIFT Readies a KYC Registry
BNY Mellon to Use Markit for EDM Support BNY Mellon Asset Management has selected Markit’s enterprise data management (EDM) platform to unify significant components of its data management operations and eliminate manual processes, say BNY and Markit officials. Markit officials say the vendor was selected after “an extensive due diligence process” and proof of concept… Read More >>
Get Ready for the Age of Volcker
Some participants at Sifma’s Annual Meeting last month were telling me that the Volcker Rule would never see the light of day. They were confident that the proposed changes made over the past two years had made the pending Dodd-Frank reform unrecognizable, even harmful to financial services firms. Surely, the regulators would drop it —… Read More >>
Nasdaq Exec Moves to ConvergEx as Rick McCarthy Heads Buy-Side Sales at Misys
Nasdaq Exec Takes Top Post at ConvergEx Group A former senior executive at Nasdaq OMX, Eric W. Noll is the new president of ConvergEx Group, which offers brokerage and trading‐related services, officials say. Noll will also be taking on the role of CEO by the end of this year, succeeding Joseph M. Velli, the incumbent… Read More >>
Bill Clinton Advises Sifma on Its Charm Offensive
Bill Clinton began his speech at Sifma’s Annual Meeting this week by saying that he has great freedom to say whatever he wants because he’s an ex-president and that, he wistfully added, no one pays attention to him. He could not have been more wrong. As we saw, his comments for news website OZY about… Read More >>
A Halloween Treat: Interim CICIs Become Permanent
Unfortunately, I do not have a Halloween tale about an operations nightmare that would scare the bejesus out of you. Instead, there appears to be a bit of good news on the global legal entity identifier (LEI) front, which is a welcome change from the recent horrors of government shutdowns, record fines and markets fearing… Read More >>
Ops Lessons from the Shutdown?
Most firms on Wall Street, regardless of political affiliation, probably see the federal government shutdown combined with the debt ceiling crisis as a waste of time and money especially when the U.S. recovery needs all the help it can get from Washington. For securities operations, though, there is a little cold comfort in the takeaways… Read More >>
The Promise of Corporate Actions Contradictions
At one point during FTF’s CAPCon New York conference yesterday, a panelist noted that many of the issues being raised have not substantially changed over the past 20 years. While I concede the point, my perception is that corporate actions processing has become a mix of extreme contradictions that are harbingers of real changes to… Read More >>
The Government’s Emergencies Could Soon Be Yours
A Treasury Department report out today states that the potential credit default by the U.S. government could be “catastrophic,” resulting in frozen credit markets, a plummeting U.S. dollar, and “skyrocketing” U.S. interest rates. In sum, we could have the Great Recession II, making the debt-limit war between Congress and the White House your emergency too…. Read More >>
