Voters have picked the 2015 winners for more than 20 categories, including Service Provider of the Year, and the FinTech and Ops Business Persons of the Year.

NEW YORK — Financial Technologies Forum (FTF) is unveiling today the winners of the fifth annual FTF News Technology Innovation Awards — a group whose diversity is reflected by the individuals and vendors that will be honored at this year’s awards ceremony in June.

Other than the Editor’s Choice award, qualified industry participants selected this year’s winners and put forward suggestions for nominees via online processes. The FTF News editorial team approved the nominees but did not pick the ultimate winners.

Operations industry participants picked Steven R. O’Hanlon as this years’ FinTech Person of the Year. O’Hanlon is the president and CEO of Numerix, a provider of cross-asset analytics for derivatives valuation and risk management operations. The company has had “unprecedented growth in revenues of more than 250% in the past five years,” according to company officials. O’Hanlon oversees Numerix’s corporate strategy, sales, operations, marketing and distribution.

Nigel Green, founder and CEO of the deVere Group, as Ops Business Person of the Year. Green is known for speaking out on many Ops-related issues, including the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA).

“I believe that I was able to garner so many votes because FATCA has negatively impacted so many people and companies around the world, and it could seriously harm the U.S., and therefore the global economy,” Green said in a prepared statement.  “As such, people appreciate those of us who have publicly fought for this toxic piece of legislation to be resigned to the history books.”

The deVere Group is a financial consultancy with more than $10 billion of funds under advice and administration, and with more than 80,000 clients around the world, company officials say.

The third individual to be honored is author and Wall Street reform advocate Larry Doyle, who is the recipient of this year’s Editor’s Choice Award. Doyle has called attention to key ongoing structural problems, post-crisis, with Wall Street.

Voters Honor Providers

Among the vendors, Eagle Investment Systems took the top honor of Service Provider of the Year, and was voted Best Buy-Side Operations Solution for Eagle Accounting, and Best Outsourcing Provider.

“We had more than 250 nominations overall and nearly 10,000 votes, making this year’s awards season the most competitive FTF has ever seen,” says Maureen Lowe, founder and president of FTF, and publisher of FTF News. “The winners should all be congratulated for their hard work and achievements in 2014 as there are so many great companies with excellent products facing tough competition in the Ops space. So, to be recognized as being the best by the industry itself is something to be truly proud of. We are very much looking forward to celebrating with the award winners, their clients and industry participants at the Rainbow Room in New York City on June 2 following the close of FTF’s two-day SecOps USA conference.”

Eagle attributed its top honors to the support of its clients and its many achievements last year, the spokesperson says.

“Beyond the milestone achieved by Eagle Accounting — in surpassing $9 trillion in capital managed over the Eagle Accounting platform — we also signed our 100^th Performance client,” according to Eagle. The vendor also reports that its secure private cloud has become the primary deployment model for the business “as over 50 percent of our clients are now deployed over Eagle Access,” the spokesperson says. “Perhaps the biggest testament to the value we provide clients is reflected by a renewal rate that exceeded 95 percent last year.”

Additionally, the Eagle spokesperson says its three awards were due in large part to clients continuing to adopt Eagle’s integrated technology and services offerings in more areas of their business.  “I would also add that our strong relationship with our parent company, BNY Mellon, is also recognized industry-wide as an important competitive advantage,” the spokesperson says. “Clients, and even competitors, recognize this.”

Some of the current winners have been recognized in previous years by voters.

“We are thrilled to win this prestigious technology innovation award for the second year in a row,” says a spokesperson for Gresham Computing. “Having only launched Clareti Transaction Control (CTC) in 2011, we have gone from launch and no customers to award-winning in just three short years. … We were up against solutions that have been on the market for many more years and with many more clients than us but it goes to show that bigger (and older) is not necessarily better.”

For the individuals to be honored, the awards process can help them highlight issues that they think are important for the industry.

“I hope that this award will help to bring increased focus on very real issues that remain hugely problematic within the conspiratorial intersection of the financial, political, and regulatory realms,” Doyle says. “These issues have been glazed over, swept under the rug, or kicked down the road but continue to widen the divide between Wall Street and Washington on one side and the rest of America on the other. The issues include: conflicts embedded within a self-regulatory system on Wall Street; a lack of meaningful transparency within the regulatory process; insufficient protections for whistleblowers and promotion of their efforts; an arbitration system that is all too often little more than a kangaroo court; a tidal wave of funds that flow from Wall Street to Washington with favors that look to be little more than payoffs in return; and so much more.”

In 2011, FTF and FTF News established the awards to celebrate and recognize the professionals, financial technology vendors, service providers, industry bodies and regulators that have made significant strides and noteworthy achievements in operational excellence. This year’s awards ceremony will take place at the Rainbow Room, a beautiful and historic venue with sweeping views on Central Park and the Manhattan skyline, on June 2, 2015.

Due to an intensely competitive awards season this year, in which the voting for several categories was neck and neck right up to the last minute, for the first time FTF News will also be honoring second and third place winners with the FTF Gold Standard Award and FTF Excellence Award, respectively.

To survive the nominations process and still be voted second or third by industry peers is no small feat, and so FTF News wanted to honor those firms whose performance in this year’s voting still merits a special mention, Lowe adds.

Below is a list of this year’s first place winners, and a complete list of winners can be found here.

The Full List of 2015 Technology Innovation Award Winners

Individual and Top Provider Awards

 

FinTech Person of the Year

Steven R. O’Hanlon, CEO and president, Numerix

 

Ops Business Person of the Year

Nigel Green, founder and CEO, deVere Group

 

Editor’s Choice Award

Larry Doyle, author and consultant, BERG Associates

 

Service Provider of the Year

Eagle Investment Systems

 

Outstanding FinTech Providers in alphabetical order by category

 

Best AML/Anti-Fraud Solution

NICE Actimize

 

Best Buy-Side Operations Solution

Eagle Investment Systems – Eagle Accounting

 

Best Clearing and Settlement Solution

Calypso

 

Best Client Reporting Solution

Advent Software – Black Diamond

 

Best Cloud Provider

InvestCloud

 

Best Collateral Management Solution

SunGard — Apex Collateral

 

Best Consultancy for Operations

Sapient Global Markets

 

Best Corporate Actions Processing Solution

SunGard — XSP

 

Best Cutting-Edge Solution

SmartStream – TLM Intraday Liquidity Management

 

Best Derivatives Operations Solution

BNY Mellon — Derivatives360

 

Best Enterprise Data Management Solution

SmartStream Reference Data Utility (RDU)

 

Best IBOR Solution

SimCorp Dimension

 

Best Middle-Office Solution

Omgeo — Central Trade Manager (CTM)

 

Best Middle-to-Back-Office Integration Solution

OpenLink

 

Best New Post-Trade Solution for the Buy Side

Fidessa AMS

 

Best Operational Data Provider

Rimes

Best Operational Risk Management Solution

Information Mosaic — IMActions

 

Best Outsourcing Provider

Eagle Investment Systems

 

Best Performance Measurement and Attribution System

StatPro — Revolution

 

Best Pricing or Valuation Solution

Numerix

 

Best Reconciliation Solution

Gresham Computing — Clareti Transaction Control (CTC)

 

Best Regulatory Compliance Solution for Operations

SWIFT

 

Best Social Media and Compliance Solution

Smarsh

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