Our free FinTech update includes news about the CFTC, Dion Global, Nasdaq, and Man Group.
Traiana Targets Ops Efficiency & Settlement Risk
A service to automate key post-trade stages of equity swaps processing has been launched by Traiana, an infrastructure solutions provider for trading and risk management. The vendor wants to automate “manual, labor intensive and inefficient” post-trade affirmation, officials say.
The new Equity Swaps Lifecycle Management offering “normalizes data reported by swap providers and conducts reconciliation and affirmation of daily valuations, payments and legal confirmations to identify any changes to the underlying swap attributes,” according to Traiana.
“It also improves the longstanding negative affirmation issues in the equity swaps market by allowing buy-side firms to view all exceptions in one place. Disputes can then be resolved between counterparties on a daily basis using the exception manager tool, rather than after monthly resets are struck,” according to the vendor.
The new service targets firms that need to review “multiple swap provider reporting statements in various formats, across thousands of trades and positions per day to look for potential issues and work out exactly what has changed at the month-end reset,” says Joanna Davies, global head of Traiana, in a prepared statement.
The first phase of the Equity Swaps Lifecycle Management offering is live with subsequent phases slated to be released throughout 2019 and 2020, officials add.
Traiana is a part of CME Group.
CFTC Awards $2 Million to Two Whistleblowers
The CFTC reports that it has awarded approximately $2 million to “two model whistleblowers who provided the agency with significant information that prompted the CFTC to open an investigation.”
The CFTC also says that it “found numerous violations of the Commodity Exchange Act (CEA) that were directly based on information from the whistleblowers. The multiple interviews and numerous documents the whistleblowers provided were highly informative and formed the basis of the CFTC’s investigation.”
The CFTC statement does not identify the whistleblowers or specify the information they provided. It does, however, note that the whistleblowers “also reported the same information to another organization, which conducted a separate investigation and shared its findings with the CFTC. Those findings significantly assisted the CFTC in building its case.”
Whistleblower awards can range from 10 to 30 percent of the money collected in actions where the amount of sanctions ordered exceeds $1 million, the commission points out.
The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 created the CFTC’s Whistleblower Program.
Since its creation, the CFTC has awarded more than $90 million to whistleblowers, who are offered both confidentiality and anti-retaliation protections, while CFTC actions associated with those awards have resulted in sanctions orders totaling more than $730 million, the commission also notes, adding that the “largest single award was approximately $30 million paid to one whistleblower.”
More about the CFTC’s Whistleblower Program can be found here.
Dion Global Launches Corporate Actions Solution
Dion Global Solutions, a supplier of systems for the wealth management industry and a technology provider to banking and financial institutions, reports the “full launch” of its corporate actions solution, which, Dion says, is currently “live with two pilot customers.”
The Dion system is “designed not only to make corporate action processing cost effective for the smallest industry participants, but to bring scalable operations to the largest,” the vendor says.
“Corporate actions continue to be an area of complexity, manual processing and high risk” according to the interim results of research into corporate action processing, conducted by the financial services consultancy, Compeer.
“We hope to assist all industry participants, regardless of size, geography or nature of business, to gain the benefits available through the application of modern systems,” Kean Williams, COO of Dion Global Solutions, says in a statement. “We have undertaken a lot of research in this area and believe we can deliver business benefits, with a total cost that is attractive to all.”
Argentina’s CSD Taps Nasdaq for Post-Trade Support
Nasdaq Inc. and Caja de Valores S.A., Argentina’s central securities depository (CSD), founded in 1974, have signed an agreement under which Nasdaq will deliver a “full CSD technology solution to Caja de Valores including registrar services. The deal marks Nasdaq’s second CSD client in Latin America.”
Using Nasdaq’s technology to update its current system, Caja de Valores will be able to “process larger volumes of transactions with a significantly increased speed and agility, while also meeting international standards in CSD products and messaging services,” according to a statement from the midtown-Manhattan stock market.
Nasdaq also points out that it is the creator of the world’s first electronic stock market, and that its technology “powers more than 100 marketplaces in 50 countries, and 1 in 10 of the world’s securities transactions.”
Man Group Creates Proprietary ESG Analytics Tool
Active investment management firm, Man Group, has launched Man Group ESG Analytics, described as “a proprietary, dashboard-style tool” that monitors non-financial risks and analyzes environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors across single issuers, portfolios and indices, officials say.
“The tool, which further enhances Man Group’s responsible investment (RI) capabilities, also features stewardship data, offering a real-time overview of a portfolio’s proxy voting performance and statistics,” according to Man Group.
The Man Group ESG Analytics offering got is start at the firm “internally under the direction of Man Group’s Responsible Investment team, with close collaboration between Man Numeric (the firm’s fundamentally-driven, quantitative investment engine) and Man Group’s risk and performance analysis team and stewardship team,” officials say. “The tool is available to all portfolio management teams across Man Group’s investment engines and can be applied across asset classes as well as to both traditional and alternative investment strategies.”
The dashboard has a proprietary ESG scoring system derived from Man Numeric’s data research, officials say.
The system applies data science and quantitative analysis to “disaggregate multi-vendor ESG datasets, allowing the tool to generate a holistic score for the sustainability profile and impact of a business,” officials say.
The new system offers datasets from three ESG data providers – Sustainalytics for ESG scoring and controversies data; MSCI for ESG scoring; and Trucost for environmental data. The data providers’ offerings are integrated into the new platform, allowing portfolio managers to evaluate a wide variety of company-specific ESG metrics.
The dashboard can help end-users identify potential ESG risks, and a built-in alert function has the ability to set limits on changes in individual or benchmark scores also allows portfolio managers to closely monitor and track movements, officials add. The dashboard also displays voting activity, “reinforcing fund-level engagement and active ownership by Man Group’s investment teams.”
Need a Reprint?