Guest Contributor: Subbiah Subramanian, Head of Instrument Engineering, Eagle Investment Systems After weeks of suspense, Greece reached an agreement with the creditors to restructure its debt. Some groups within the global financial market such as the ISDA called it a default, as this restructuring resulted in financial losses for creditors. This triggered a credit event
Conference and Event Planning
Face-to-Face Takes on New Meaning
I was intrigued to read a piece in Information Week this past January on desktop video conferencing and a recent rise in its usage. Basically, the article states the appeal for video conferencing lies with “improving employee and customer collaboration while reducing travel costs”. Another reason given was that video can be more useful than
Financial Technologies Forum (FTF)
FTF Takes on Retail Banking
We’re always thinking of new ways to grow at FTF and therefore we are in the midst of planning a new conference that will focus on retail banking and mobile technologies for May 22nd in NYC (agenda to be posted soon on www.ftfnews.com). We are collaborating with Aite Group on this event, which we are
Financial Technology
To RFP or not to RFP, that is the Question – Do a Proof of Concept Instead
Guest Contributor: Berl Kaufman, Principal, Afferent Consulting Services In some cases you are mandated to do RFPs for your product selections. Don’t do RFPs as a reflex action. The RFP is mostly a waste of time. Vendors always lie on RFPs to get high scores and qualify for your short list. The RFP is only
Cloud
How to Launch a Hedge Fund … Did You Miss Out?
I am pleased to report that we received a ton of great feedback from our most recent How to Launch a Hedge Fund seminar in New York last week! Subjects discussed ranged from the up-front decisions and vendors needed to start a fund to the major legal issues a start-up would face. Sessions also got
Financial Technologies Forum (FTF)
Financial Technology Acquisitions: A(nother) Year-in-Review
Well, it’s hard to imagine, but another year has nearly passed, which means it’s time, once again, for my end-of-year fintech acquisition write-up. Believe it or not, I was wrong last year when I predicted that 2011 would result in MORE acquisitions. Last year, I compiled a list of 43 and this year, I have
Cloud
RIAs: Moving on up – to the Cloud Part I
Guest Contributor: Andrew Peddar, North American CEO, StatPro Registered Investment Advisors (RIAs) have long relied on one of two choices for portfolio analytics and reporting: enterprise wide technologies and services or niche technologies. While enterprise technologies are packaged with lots of functionality, the functionality often doesn’t meet the granular needs of the advisor and lack
Back-Office
The Role of Big Data Analytics – Living in a 2.0 World
Guest Contributer: Andrew Ettinger, Director, Sales, Greenplum Let’s face it, we live in a different world today. I am sitting here on my Mac computer, with my iPhone out, my iPad is in my briefcase, I am answering email on both my phone and computer, I am surfing the web from paying a credit card
Compliance
Catching Up to Fraud
I have to admit, I’ve never really thought about what steps go into catching the masterminds behind financial crime. I’ve heard all about firms upping their compliance and updating their strategies to catch suspicious activity internally, but I have never taken into account the role that the SEC plays in tracking the tips and complaints
Compliance
Mobile Technology – Helpful or Hurtful?
Mobile technology is currently a hot topic for the financial services industry. Many industry publications, including our own FTF News, have written special reports (I will link Eugene’s article here) exploring the growing mobile technology space and the new prospects it has created. Companies have been using this new resource to open up the communication
