Using a mobile phone can get pricey if you’re not careful. That’s a lesson two banks have learned the hard way, each paying multi-million dollar penalties for alleged “recordkeeping and supervision failures for widespread use of unapproved communication methods.” The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has filed and settled charges against the Bank of… Read More >>
Solve the SSI Issue Once & For All: Q&A
(Editor’s note: It looks as if industry veteran Bill Meenaghan, founder and CEO of SSImple, a fintech startup is on a mission to resolve the “age-old” problem of manually-based Standard Settlement Instruction (SSI) systems via distributed ledger technology (DLT). Meenaghan, who has more than 20 years of financial services experience, the relatively new company want… Read More >>
Goldman Sachs Settles Gender Bias Case for $215M
Goldman Sachs and the law firms representing 2,800 women — Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, and Outten & Golden — announced that they have resolved a gender discrimination class action lawsuit for $215 million, ending a legal action that began in 2010 and would have gone to trial next month, officials say. A lawyer for… Read More >>
SEC Whistleblower Awarded Nearly $279M & Other News
Biggest SEC Whistleblower Award to Date A whistleblower somewhere recently got a check or two for nearly $279 million from the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to the SEC, which adds that it is the “largest-ever award” to date. The whistleblower’s “information and assistance led to the successful enforcement of SEC and related actions,” according… Read More >>
Firms Can Consolidate Ops Silos: Q&A
(In early March, financial information provider SIX announced that its global pricing, market, and reference data can be delivered to investment accounting platform FundGuard’s investment book of record (IBOR), accounting book of record (ABOR), and net asset value (NAV) solutions. The partnership means that FundGuard has access to SIX’s end-of-day market prices, core security master… Read More >>
Will Europe Move to T+1?
The move to a shorter settlement cycle for European equities has many more moving parts than the transition in the U.S. and Canada, which are moving fast from the current trading day plus two (T+2) settlement cycle to the shorter, one-day, T+1 time frame for equity markets. In addition, Europe does yet face pressure from… Read More >>
Time to Rethink A.I.?
You don’t need artificial intelligence (A.I.) to predict what the economy is up to, or the perils of global climate change, or even what the local weather will be like next weekend. But that does appear to be where we are headed. Don’t just take it from FTF News. Ask Jamie Dimon, the chief executive… Read More >>
T. Rowe Price & Others to Test Public Blockchains
While the hype surrounding blockchain technology cooled long ago, the hope remains that it will yield trading technology breakthroughs. With that hope in mind, T. Rowe Price Associates, WisdomTree, Wellington Management, and Cumberland are “an initial cohort” of financial services firms participating in a test of public blockchain infrastructure. They will explore the benefits of… Read More >>
Goldman Sachs Settles Swap Violations Case for $15M
Goldman Sachs & Co. is settling a case of alleged swap-trading violations with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) for $15 million. The regulator alleges that the firm in 2015 and 2016 “failed to provide the clients with the transparency that the regulations require.” In particular, the CFTC “found that Goldman failed to disclose dozens… Read More >>
SWIFT Optimistic After Applying Blockchain to Corporate Actions
Six major financial services firms and the SWIFT financial messaging cooperative report that late last month they pilot-tested a blockchain-based solution that streamlines the communication of “significant corporate events to investors” by getting rid of multiple data problems. In an announcement and a report, SWIFT provided details about this latest collaborative experiment with six securities… Read More >>
