The threat of cyberattacks was prominent again in the news last week as the Department of Justice via the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York unsealed grand jury indictments against seven hackers based in Iran charged with running coordinated cyber-attacks on U.S. financial services firms and securities exchanges. In fact, Justice… Read More >>
FINRA Fines Wedbush $675K on Supervisory Violation Charges
The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) reports that it has censured and levied a $675,000 fine against Wedbush Securities Inc. for “supervisory violations” that concerned a client’s “chronic fails to deliver” after so-called naked trades of leveraged exchange-traded funds (ETFs), during the January 2010 to March 2012 period. The Wedbush client was broker-dealer Scout Trading,… Read More >>
CME May Spur Bidding War for the LSE
There is a sense of déjà vu in the air with talk of a $28 billion merger between Deutsche Börse and the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG). The two have been circling around each other for years but as in the past, rival exchanges may try and break the bond. This time around the Intercontinental… Read More >>
Deutsche Börse to Sell ISE to Nasdaq for $1.1B
Just as the London Stock Exchange and Deutsche Börse Group are in a tango over a potential merger, Deutsche Börse officials took a side step and agreed to sell International Securities Exchange Holdings, Inc. (ISE) to Nasdaq for a total cash consideration of $1.1 billion, officials say. Nasdaq and Deutsche Börse officials confirm that they… Read More >>
Nasdaq to Test Blockchain via Tallinn Exchange
The Republic of Estonia’s year-old e-residency platform will be “facilitating a blockchain-based e-voting service to allow shareholders of companies listed on Nasdaq’s Tallinn Stock Exchange, Estonia’s only regulated securities market, to vote in shareholder meetings,” Nasdaq reports. Blockchain technology supports distributed ledger databases and traces its history to the emergence of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. Estonia’s… Read More >>
Nasdaq Targets Investor Relations via New Platform
Exchange operator and technology provider Nasdaq is launching a platform, dubbed Nasdaq IR Insight, to help executives at public companies better manage their investor relations. With investor relations officers (IROs) in mind, Nasdaq officials say the platform was created via “an iterative process of collaboration with clients from the corporate finance suite in order to… Read More >>
Ops Gets on the Blockchain Revolution Bus
Bitcoin, a so-called crypto-currency, may fade before anyone really understands what it was or how it could actually have prevailed in financial services. However, out of Bitcoin’s ashes has risen the humbly named Blockchain technology. The distributed ledger technology that has been propping up Bitcoin has come to the attention of major industry players. This… Read More >>
Why Nasdaq and Symbiont Vie for Blockchain Firsts
The rush to the first-mover status via Blockchain technology is heating up between Nasdaq and Symbiont, the maker of the Smart Securities platform for trading, clearing, settling and transferring financial instruments. These early adopters are vying for key milestones in securities operations that can be transformed by the Blockchain distributed ledger technology that underpins the… Read More >>
ISC Creates a Map for T+2 Move
The nitty gritty of shorter settlement cycles is getting clearer as the U.S. T+2 International Steering Committee (T+2 ISC) has submitted its Implementation Playbook to the SEC on December 18 and released to the industry on Dec. 21 to provide the industry with a timeline to help them move to a two-day settlement cycle (T+2)… Read More >>
Time to Ramp Up Social Media Risk Management?
Financial services firms may want to up their social media compliance training say industry experts reacting to the news that a federal grand jury in San Francisco and the SEC are charging James Alan Craig, who lives in Scotland, with securities fraud via an alleged scheme involving Twitter accounts and damaging messages. In fact, to… Read More >>
