FTF News also reports upon FinTech developments from QuantHouse, Jane Street, SimCorp and the deVere Group.
CFTC and FCA Sign Agreement to Collaborate
The U.S. CFTC and the U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) report the signing of an agreement that “commits the regulators to collaborating and supporting innovative firms through each other’s fintech initiatives” — LabCFTC in the U.S. and FCA Innovate in Great Britain.
The heads of both regulators saluted the new arrangement, which is meant to facilitate fintech innovation and spotlight best practices.
“The FCA’s Project Innovate is the gold standard for thoughtful regulatory engagement with emerging technological innovation,” CFTC Chairman J. Christopher Giancarlo says in a joint statement. “This is the first FinTech innovation arrangement for the CFTC with a non-US counterpart,” he adds.
“International borders shouldn’t act as a barrier to innovation and competition in financial services and that is why agreements like the one we have signed today with the CFTC, a forward looking and proactive regulator, are so important,” Andrew Bailey, CEO of the FCA, says in the statement.
The FCA and the CFTC will be hosting a joint event in London to demonstrate how firms can engage with both regulators.
The FCA and the CFTC’s cooperation arrangement on financial technology innovation — as the fintech arrangement, is formally called — includes information-sharing regarding market trends and developments, and it also “facilitates referrals” of fintech companies considering entering each others’ market.
FCA Innovate was created in October 2014 and LabCFTC in May 2017, per the statement.
LabCFTC has “engaged with over 150 entities since its launch last year, published its first primer on the topic of virtual currencies, and soon will seek public feedback on a planned 2018 innovation competition,” according to the statement.
QuantHouse Adds Jane Street’s SI to its API Systems
QuantHouse, a provider of end-to-end market data and trading through application program interface-based technologies, reports the addition of Jane Street Financial’s systematic internalizer (SI) to its qh API software suite.
QuantHouse characterizes Jane Street as a liquidity provider specializing in equities, exchange traded funds (ETFs) and options — “trading $5.6 trillion across financial products in 2017. The firm commits its own capital and uses its global footprint to help institutions trade with consistently tight spreads.”
QuantHouse characterizes itself as offering “hedge funds, market makers, investment banks, brokers and trading venues” software that helps “achieve optimal trading performance, develop and integrate new trading strategies, comply with regulatory requirements, test existing and new trading infrastructure tools and rationalize operating costs.”
QuantHouse notes that Jane Street “offers liquidity for more than 2,000 single stocks from the Cboe [the Chicago Board Options Exchange] Europe universe, with a focus on small and mid-cap names,” offering QuantHouse’s customers “access to Jane Street’s SI via a single API built and maintained by QuantHouse.”
QuantHouse also calls New York-headquartered Jane Street a “quantitative trading firm and liquidity provider with a … focus on technology and collaborative problem solving” that “trades in more than 45 countries and 170 trading venues globally.”
German Pension Fund Picks SimCorp’s Dimension
SimCorp, which describes itself as a provider of investment management solutions and services to the financial services industry, reports that SOKA-BAU, a German construction-industry pension fund, has picked SimCorp Dimension as its new front- to back-office investment management platform.
SOKA-BAU’s corporate pension plans are provided to all employees of the approximately 75,000 companies within the German construction industry, per SimCorp.
Dimension, SimCorp’s integrated suite of financial software, will be employed to help achieve SOKA-BAU’s “goals to achieve greater automation, scalability to the fund’s future growth ambitions, and the flexibility to adapt to new, complex market conditions and requirements,” SimCorp says.
Dimension will also provide SOKA-BAU with “extensive risk management functionality, which will support the pension fund with efficient risk measurement of its portfolio,” SimCorp adds.
deVere Group Adds Ripple, Dash to App
The deVere Group is adding two cryptocurrencies to its app even if cryptocurrency markets are in a highly volatile stage, officials say.
“Users of deVere Crypto, the deVere Group’s trailblazing app launched only three weeks ago, can now also store, transfer and exchange Ripple (XRP) and Dash (DASH), alongside the existing cryptocurrencies on the app: Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH) and Litecoin (LTC),” according to a DeVere Group statement. “By market cap, Bitcoin is the world’s largest, followed by Ethereum (second) and Ripple (third). Litecoin is fifth and Dash is tenth.”
“We wanted to expand our offering on deVere Crypto for two key reasons,” says Nigel Green, deVere Group founder and CEO in a statement. “First, all cryptocurrencies have different characteristics, strengths and values and, therefore, they’re useful in different ways for people and organizations. The cryptocurrencies covered by the deVere Crypto app “have been painstakingly analyzed and evaluated by the deVere Crypto Research Department, run by 10 of the world’s leading blockchain and crypto experts. … And second, demand for and interest in cryptocurrencies is set to grow exponentially this year and beyond – and we want to meet that demand for our clients.”
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