Our FinTech roundup covers news from RBC Correspondent Services, Evidology Systems, LedgerEdge, and FIS & FICO.
ARRC Webinars Explain SOFR & More
The Alternative Reference Rates Committee (ARRC) has launched a “Summer Series” of webinars that will focus on the replacement for the London Inter-bank Offered Rate (LIBOR), and that will run for the rest of this month and throughout August.
Global financial markets have begun a transition away from the scandal-ridden LIBOR and to the Secured Overnight Financing Rate (SOFR). These events “are designed to educate the public on the history of LIBOR,” and to introduce markets to SOFR, the recommended alternative to U.S. dollar LIBOR, according to ARRC officials.
The SOFR Summer Series has already launched via a webinar on “Libor: Entering the Endgame,” that aired Monday, July 13, hosted by the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The second panel, “SOFR Explained,” took place July 15. Recordings of these webinars have been posted online.
The next panels are:
- July 22, “Preparing to move from LIBOR Derivatives;”
- July 29, “Accounting/Tax/Regulation;”
- August 3, “Approaching the Transition;”
- August 7, “Office Hours Live.”
More details about the webinars can be found here: https://nyfed.org/3jbGtus
The ARRC consists of private-market participants gathered together by the Federal Reserve Board and Federal Reserve Bank of New York in cooperation with the CFTC, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, the New York Department of Financial Services, the Office of Financial Research, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the SEC, and the U.S. Treasury Department.
Centennial Picks RBC Correspondent Services
RBC Correspondent Services, a U.S.-based clearing provider, reports that Centennial Securities, a registered broker-dealer and investment advisor based in Grand Rapids, MI, has chosen the RBC business unit as its new clearing and premier service provider.
Centennial Securities will employ the technology of RBC Correspondent Service to “enhance the investor-advisor experience by using its … digital account opening and servicing platform,” according to an RBC statement.
The firms’ new relationship “will also enhance Centennial Securities capabilities and solutions by providing the sophisticated planning tools, broad investment platform and the extensive roster of experienced wealth management specialists within RBC,” per the statement.
RBC Correspondent Services is a division of RBC Capital Markets LLC, which in turn is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Royal Bank of Canada.
Centennial Securities is a brokerage and investment advisory services firm headquartered in Grand Rapids, Michigan, with offices in Michigan and Chicago, Illinois.”
Evidology Platform Works with Microsoft Teams
Evidology Systems, a provider of the QED platform, which it characterizes as “aimed at principles-based regulations,” reports that its system is “now fully integrated with Microsoft Teams, for the first time enabling sustained management of regulatory compliance from within that application.”
Regulations compliance “can now be tracked and demonstrated through Microsoft Teams,” according to Evidology, allowing the “financial sector and other verticals to extend this widely-used collaborative technology to compliance.”
In April of this year, the vendor notes, Evidology announced its platform’s “integration with MS Office 365,” which was the precursor to the recent Microsoft Teams integration.
LedgerEdge Launched for the Corporate Bond Market
David E. Rutter
David E. Rutter, a veteran of electronic fixed income trading, has formed LedgerEdge, a new company whose members will operate under the mandate to “build an ecosystem for the exchange of data and assets in the corporate bond market.”
According to the new company’s statement, the “corporate bond market lags behind other asset classes in adoption of digital solutions: $59bn is traded daily, but only 30% of this is traded electronically.”
Rutter has more than 35 years of experience in building platforms for electronic fixed income trading, per the statement.
Among those platforms are BrokerTec and LiquidityEdge, which was sold last year to MarketAxess for USD $150 million, LedgerEdge notes.
LedgerEdge includes David Nicol (IBM/R3) as CEO, Ian Chicken (ICAP/BrokerTec) as chief operating officer (COO) and Bob Bose (Santander/NYSE Euronext) as chief technology officer, the statement enumerates.
Rutter remains CEO of R3, an enterprise blockchain vendor that he also founded, LedgerEdge also notes.
FIS & FICO to Build AML Solutions
Financial technology vendor FIS is working with FICO, a predictive analytics and financial crime prevention provider, “to build an advanced anti-money laundering (AML) solution that will help North American financial institutions keep ahead of increasingly sophisticated money launderers and other financial criminals,” officials say.
“The new solution, FIS AML Compliance Manager, will integrate FICO Falcon X decision management technology to provide financial institutions with a unified platform for AML risk and compliance. The cloud-based solution will use machine learning and artificial intelligence (A.I.) to detect suspicious activity and provide bank investigators with detailed, transparent intelligence,” officials add.
The A.I.-based solution will help organizations cut costs “associated with false positives,” officials say. “False positives — system-generated alerts of potential illicit activity that are later cleared during reviews — cost the financial industry a significant amount of wasted investigation time each year.”
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