(Prerak Sanghvi and his New York City-based employer Clear Street, which describes itself as “an independent, non-bank prime broker” are on a mission. They want to help the capital markets industry move beyond mainframe-based, legacy infrastructures and onto Clear Street’s cloud-native clearing and custody system. Getting there will require application programming interfaces (APIs), which are links… Read More >>
Saxo Bank Told to Dump Crypto Assets
Saxo Bank A/S’ trading in crypto-currency assets for its own account was “outside the legal business area of financial institutions,” according to a recent ruling by the Danish Financial Supervisory Authority, which ordered the Copenhagen-based bank to “dispose of its own holdings of crypto assets.” “On 4 July 2023, the Danish Financial Supervisory Authority [FSA]… Read More >>
Crystal Capital Partners to Deploy SS&C Systems & Other News
Crystal Capital to Bolster Ops via SS&C Systems Crystal Capital Partners, an alternative investment platform provider, reports that it has selected the Geneva and Advent systems from SS&C Technologies to “streamline portfolio management and reporting across more than 500 customized portfolios and support further growth,” officials say. “Our integration with SS&C will help streamline the… Read More >>
Nasdaq Buys Adenza for $10.5 Billion
Nasdaq, known for its exchanges, will be securing its goal of becoming mostly a solutions provider with its just announced definitive $10.5 billion agreement to acquire Adenza — which is a combination of Calypso and AxiomSL — from private equity firm Thoma Bravo. Once authorities approve the $10.5 billion price tag, which consists of cash… Read More >>
SEC Takes Aim at Binance & Coinbase: Reporter’s Notebook
Crypto-currency is crapto-currency. Naturally, the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission wouldn’t put it that way. The commission is much too proper. But take it from FTF News, that’s the gist of the SEC’s recent complaint against Binance Holdings Ltd. and Changpeng Zhao, its founder. It’s also the gist of a second legal complaint, alleging similar… Read More >>
FINRA Fines Vanguard $800K for Inaccurate Fund Statements
Shouldn’t a firm like Vanguard Marketing Corp., (VMC) which has been a member of FINRA, the broker-dealer industry’s self-regulatory organization, since 1977, know better than to have allegedly “overstated projected yield and projected annual income for nine money market funds on approximately 8.5 million VMC account statements?” Says FINRA: “From at least October 2019 to… Read More >>
Adopt a Single Strategy & Functional Approach for T+1: Q&A
(Stephane Ritz, a managing principal at consultancy Capco, has more than two decades of experience in the administration and management of professional services for the banking, finance, and investment industries. His areas of expertise include financial accounting and taxation to business process re-engineering and IT technology implementation. Ritz specializes in leading large-scale, complex business transformations across… Read More >>
DLT-Based Ops Will Need Guardrails: Report
As more securities operations use distributed ledger technology (DLT), policymakers, regulators, and market participants need to identify regulation, supervision, and risk management practices that “support appropriate stability and protections for all industry stakeholders,” according to a new report, “The Impact of Distributed Ledger Technology in Global Capital Markets.” The report is the result of a… Read More >>
Securities Tainted via Sanctions Up by 262% & Other News
Sanctioned Securities Creating New Woes for ETFs Data vendor SIX reports that the “number of securities tainted by sanctions has increased by 262 percent since the Ukraine war began in February 2022,” which creates a new set of operational problems for buy and sell-side firms especially those working in exchange-traded funds (ETFs). The discovery stems… Read More >>
SEC Pushes New ‘Living Wills’ for Clearing Agencies
Late last week, the SEC announced that it is proposing big changes for covered clearing agencies (CCAs) that “would augment and strengthen the requirements of the rules that govern CCAs.” When translated from the legal gobbledygook, the SEC really wants better “living wills” a.k.a. “recovery and orderly wind-down plans (RWP)” for clearing agencies that may… Read More >>