In other news, OpenFin taps Goldmans, ISDA has a CDM pilot, NRI lands a new partner, and the SEC rewards a whistleblower with $4.5 million.
ETFs To Be Compared Against IA’s 37 Fund Sectors
The U.K. industry group Investment Association (IA) has agreed to let exchange traded funds (ETFs) join the IA sectors, officials say.
The IA represents U.K. asset managers and supports British savers, investors and businesses, officials say. The association has 250 members that oversee £7.7 trillion of assets and employ 100,000 jobs across the U.K.
“Savers and their advisers will be able to compare ETFs against the 3,500 funds already in the IA’s 37 fund sectors from the first quarter of next year,” according to an official statement. “The ETFs will be placed within the existing IA sectors, which enable comparison between open ended funds by dividing them into groups of similar funds based on factors such as asset class, investment strategy and geographical region.”
With more than 200 ETFs eligible to apply, the IA “is now inviting formal applications from ETF providers for their funds to be classified into the sectors,” officials say. “Consistent with the current approach, only ETFs that are either U.K. domiciled, or are EU UCITs with HMRC reporting fund status will be included.”
“We want to ensure that the IA sectors reflect the full range of products the asset management industry has to offer savers around the world,” says Galina Dimitrova, director of investment and capital markets at the Investment Association, in a prepared statement. “ETFs are a growing part of this market and their inclusion in the sectors will enable consumers to compare across a wider variety of products.”
The U.K. is the second largest investment management center in the world, after the U.S., and manages 35 percent of all assets managed in Europe, according to IA officials.
OpenFin Appoints Ex-Goldman Sachs MD as Euro CTO
OpenFin, a provider of financial operating system, reports that a former Goldman Sachs managing director Tim Dinsdale has joined the firm as European chief technology officer (CTO).
OpenFin is focused upon creating and promoting operating systems to help financial services firms modernize desktops and accelerate innovation, officials say. The OpenFin OS has been implemented to deploy thousands of applications to more than 1,500 sell-side and buy-side firms.
Dinsdale reports to Chuck Doerr, OpenFin’s president and chief operating officer (COO). He will be responsible for “leading the firm’s technology efforts across the region, expanding OpenFin’s London-based development team and driving OpenFin’s desktop services initiatives globally, including OpenFin Layouts,” the firm says in a statement.
“Having spent 15 years at Goldman Sachs, I am keenly aware of the value of fintech collaborations in speeding up go-to-market strategies and allowing large institutions to focus on their core competencies rather than the infrastructure that makes it happen,” Dinsdale says in a prepared statement. “OpenFin is already working with 22 major banks to help them solve business challenges and support their digital transformation strategies and I am excited to be part of this journey.”
Before his tenure at Goldman Sachs, Dinsdale worked in the gaming industry as a software engineer for Sony Computer Entertainment Europe and as a C++ Developer for video game developer Kuju Ltd.
New York-based OpenFin’s investors include Barclays, Bain Capital Ventures, DRW Venture Capital, Euclid Opportunities, J.P. Morgan, NYCA Partners, Pivot Investment Partners and Wells Fargo, among others.
ISDA Deploys CDM for U.K. Regulatory Reporting Pilot
The International Swaps and Derivatives Association, Inc. (ISDA) reports the deployment of its common domain model (CDM) to support the U.K. Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the Bank of England and other participating financial institutions in testing phase two of the digital regulatory reporting (DRR) pilot for derivatives.
The DRR is a U.K. initiative to explore the use of technology to help firms meet their regulatory reporting requirements and to improve the quality of information reported, ISDA says.
The association also notes that the pilot’s aim is to explore the feasibility of a model-driven and machine-readable regulatory environment that could transform how the financial services industry understands, interprets and reports regulatory information.
Phase two of the DRR pilot began earlier this year, and follows the 2018 first phase. The collaboration is expected to contribute to an understanding how the DRR approach scales across multiple regulatory domains, per ISDA.
NRI India Subsidiary and Digital Asset Form Partnership
Nomura Research Institute’s (NRI) wholly owned subsidiary, Financial Technologies India Pvt. Ltd. and Digital Asset, a provider of distributed ledger processes and procedures, are jointly using the Digital Asset Modeling Language (DAML), the open-source contract language created by Digital Asset, for business processes and transaction workflows.
DAML models “business processes using smart contracts, capturing the rights and obligations associated with any asset class, business transaction or complex multi-party workflow to drive automation and efficiency,” the companies say in a statement.
“NRI FT India was able to develop multiple Proof of Concepts with DAML Smart Contracts within a short span of just five months,” Maulindu Chatterjee, head of global delivery at NRI FT India, says in a prepared statement. “NRI FT India is looking forward to expanding the work we’re doing with Digital Asset in the Australian, Hong Kong and Japanese markets.”
NRI tallies approximately 13,000 employees in more than 50 offices worldwide, including in New York, London, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Australia. NRI also reports annual sales above $4.2 billion.
SEC’s Latest Whistleblower Award Hits $4.5 Million
The SEC has awarded more than $4.5 million to a whistleblower, which marks a total of approximately $381 million paid out to 62 individuals since the first whistleblower award in 2012, according to the U.S. regulator.
The latest whistleblower’s tip “triggered the company to review the allegations as part of an internal investigation and subsequently report the whistleblower’s allegations to the SEC and another agency,” SEC officials say.
“The whistleblower sent an anonymous tip to the company alleging significant wrongdoing and submitted the same information to the SEC within 120 days of reporting it to the company,” officials add. “This information prompted the company to review the whistleblower’s allegations of misconduct and led the company to report the allegations to the SEC and the other agency.”
The self-reporting by the company spurred the SEC to open its own investigation into the alleged misconduct. “This is the first time a claimant is being awarded under this provision of the whistleblower rules, which was designed to incentivize internal reporting by whistleblowers,” officials say.
More information about the whistleblower program and Dodd-Frank anti-retaliation provisions can be found here.
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