SmartStream, the CFTC, Opus, and the SEC also have FinTech news.
Blockchain Proof of Concept Effort Will Go On
Credit Suisse, Ipreo, Symbiont and R3 have completed the successful initial stage of a project to demonstrate how blockchain technology can be used to improve the syndicated loan market, officials say. The proof of concept will continue throughout the year and will includes participation from agent banks, service providers and fund managers.
Credit Suisse is leading the project, which is being managed by R3 in its laboratory and research center, officials say. The project uses technology solutions from Synaps Loans, a partnership combining Symbiont’s smart contract technology with Ipreo’s new business process solution for loan trade settlement.
The participants who collaborated and provided testing resources to the project include R3 consortium members BBVA, Danske Bank, Royal Bank of Scotland, Scotiabank, Société Générale, State Street, U.S. Bank and Wells Fargo. Buy-side firms AllianceBernstein (AB), Eaton Vance Management, KKR and Oak Hill Advisors are also involved in the initiative, officials add.
“This project demonstrates the potential for blockchain technology to fundamentally reshape the syndicated loan market and the capital markets more broadly,” said Emmanuel Aidoo, head of the distributed ledger and blockchain effort at Credit Suisse, in a prepared statement. “This demonstration sets us on a path to increase efficiency and reduce costs, which will benefit banks and clients alike. By connecting a network of agent banks through blockchain, we can achieve faster and more certain settlements in the loan market.”
Raiffeisen Bank Deploys SmartStream Solutions
Raiffeisen Bank International AG is taking on the demands of Basel III and implemented a cash and liquidity reporting solution from SmartStream Technologies “to monitor and manage cash positions on an intraday basis, throughout the group,” according to SmartStream
“In 2014, Raiffeisen Bank International AG decided to take a forward thinking approach to combat the impact of the regulation by implementing the Corona Cash & Liquidity reporting solution throughout the Raiffeisen Banking Group Austria,” according to SmartStream officials. “The solution was the result of a successful collaboration between SmartStream’s product development team in Vienna and the bank’s treasury domain experts.”
The centralized view on cash positions throughout the bank is seen as being essential for cash management, forecasting and trading needs. The vendor solution can generate complete reports also “incorporating, for example, central bank deposits – helping the bank allocate funds and feed into this report,” according to SmartStream.
The bank is reacting to the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision’s release of the “Principles for Sound Liquidity Risk Management and Supervision” for intraday liquidity management with a target date of January 2017.
“SmartStream demonstrated that their data was accurate and supported our strategic goals,” says Wolfgang Pollak, senior asset liability manager at Raiffeisen, in a prepared statement. “The Corona solution also provides real time data from external sources.”
CFTC Slates Roundtable on CCP Resilience & Recovery
CFTC staff will hold a public roundtable on October 6, 2016, from 9:00 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., to review the CPMI-IOSCO guidance on central counterparty (CCP) resilience and recovery, according to the regulator.
“The goal of the roundtable is to gather the perspective of different stakeholder groups, on a detailed and technical level, regarding the impact this guidance will have in the context of U.S. derivatives clearing organizations (DCOs). The roundtable will include panelists from U.S. DCOs, their clearing members (futures commission merchants or FCMs), and the customers of their participants and others,” according to the CFTC.
The guidance, Consultative Report on Resilience and Recovery of Central Counterparties (CCPs): Further Guidance on the PFMI (CPMI-IOSCO) was issued August 16 and is available at CPMI-IOSCO Consultative Report.
The roundtable take place at the Conference Center at the CFTC’s headquarters at Three Lafayette Centre, 1155 21st St., NW, Washington, D.C. To listen by phone, participants should call: in the U.S., toll free: (866) 844-9416; and international callers can click http://bit.ly/2dpw10k for international dial-in numbers. The participants’ passcode is CFTC. More information is available via Tracey Wingate, special counsel, division of clearing and risk, at twingate@cftc.gov .
Opus Launches FATCA and Entity Identifiers Tool
Regulatory technology vendor Opus announced that Alacra, its know your customer (KYC) and reference data management platform, has published a reference tool for financial regulation, regulators and compliance that includes the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) acronyms and entity identifiers.
The free reference resource, the Periodic Table of Bank Regulation and Compliance is available online “and lists all the current regulators along with an overview of their regulations, jurisdictions, links, intended function of the directive and the market sector(s) they affect,” officials say. The periodic table displays acronyms and information on the most common regulations in banking.
Whistleblower Gets $4 Million from the SEC
Another Wall Street whistleblower got a fat check from the SEC via an award of more than $4 million for “original information” that alerted the agency to fraud underway, SEC officials say.
“The SEC’s whistleblower program has awarded more than $111 million to 34 whistleblowers since its inception in 2011,” according to the SEC.
The program is intended to incentivize whistleblowers to share “solid information that helps us bring violators to justice before more wrongdoing can occur,” says Jane Norberg, acting chief of the SEC’s Office of the Whistleblower.
By law, the SEC protects the confidentiality of whistleblowers and does not disclose information that might directly or indirectly reveal a whistleblower’s identity, officials say. More information about the SEC’s whistleblower program is at: www.sec.gov/whistleblower
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