It’s that time of year when FTF News pauses to review the top securities operations trends of great interest to our readership in the year that was 2015. It’s been a year in which major banks and other financial institutions were slammed with penalties by the regulators. Mergers and acquisitions were rampant among big industry… Read More >>
Vendors Are Rushing to Fill Voids in Ops Offerings
Front-office financial technology vendors are moving quickly to expand their reach into the middle and back office while traditional portfolio accounting systems providers are moving upstream into the middle office in attempts to provide a fuller suite of asset management operational services, according to a new report from market research firm Celent, a division of… Read More >>
Recs to Face Greater Regulatory Scrutiny in Europe
European regulators are focusing greater attention on data integrity particularly when it comes to the reconciliation of securities operations, and that may give the back office a stronger role in the IT budgeting process, say Maryse Gordon, a senior pre-sales consultant for the UnaVista hosted services business of the London Stock Exchange Group. Speaking at… Read More >>
Ops Resolutions for 2014?
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 >>
Q&A: When Bad IT Sinks Post-Trade Processes
Donal Byrne is the CEO of Corvil, which provides solutions to monitor the performance of business processes and services and information technology hardware, software and networking infrastructures. FTF News asked Byrne to focus on the operations problems caused by poor infrastructure performance such as slow application response times, garbled voice support and low-quality video communications…. Read More >>
Back to Innovation
In past posts, I have focused on the challenges that financial technology innovation faces. But innovation appears to be forging ahead despite the odds and with the help of the FinTech Innovation Lab, an annual program of the New York City Investment Fund and Accenture. The Lab recently hosted a presentation of the new offerings… Read More >>
Give Global Harmony a Chance
It’s becoming clear that as global markets have become more tightly connected, so should the rules-making processes. We need an international harmonization of regulations and standards for everything from proxy voting to OTC derivatives. Of course, this is easier said than done. Much has been made of the regulatory arbitrage that is looming if the… Read More >>
Q&A: Broadridge
When I spoke to Charles V. Callan, senior vice president, regulatory affairs for Broadridge Financial Solutions in late June, the proxy voting season—roughly February 15 to May 1—had just ended. For Broadridge, the season consisted of 3,174 meetings of publicly traded US companies that have many shareholder interactions. Since Broadridge introduced proxy voting services by… Read More >>
Q&A: COO Says Hedge Fund’s Launch Hinged on Experts and Dedication
Michele McGovern helped launch the San Francisco-based Resultant Capital Partners, a US equity, long-short, market neutral money manager in May 2010. She joined as partner and chief operating officer (COO), working alongside Resultant founders Jeffrey Skelton, managing partner and CEO, and Michael Henman, partner and head of business development; Skelton and Henman are the former… Read More >>
Layoffs Make a Comeback
Suddenly, the “L” word has returned. Over the past month, media reports have been surfacing that layoffs at A-List firms are on the rise. Several factors appear to be taking their toll—lower equities trading volumes, shrinking stock prices, profit fears over coming regulations, changes in compensation, and the redundancies that follow mergers. The New York… Read More >>
