Guest Contributor: Steven Grob, Director Group Strategy, Fidessa The merger mania in the exchange space took another twist last week when a consortium of Canada’s largest banks and pension funds put forward an alternative offer for TMX in an attempt to scupper the LSE Group’s own merger proposals with the Canadian exchange. There’s a clue
Financial Technology
Operational Trading Technology Trends in 2011
Guest Contributor: Martin Hakker, EVP of Marketing, Fidessa and Managing Director, Fidessa Canada Corporation Technology investment is on the rise this year as firms look to capitalize on the new look trading environment. Despite many companies postponing infrastructure projects during the downturn, sophisticated tools with adequate flexibility are required to manage the raft of new
Financial Technology
A Battle Royal: Broker vs. Independent – The importance of 3rd Party Pricing Examined
Guest Contributor: Dario Cintioli, Products Director, StatPro The debate between referencing broker pricing or independent pricing has been raging among asset managers in recent years. Broker pricing is often arrived at through the averaging of assets, which can cause a biased valuation. On the other hand, pricing technologies haven’t kept up with the pace of
Derivatives
Proposed Derivatives Rules: Regulators Going Too Far?
Guest Contributor: John Jay, Senior Analyst, Aite Group The name of the game is derivatives regulation, and financial regulators are asking end users to ante up. While pursuing risk management activities, non-financial firms may be subjected to posting higher collateral requirements with their financial counterparties (i.e., banks) than are currently necessary. In part, these firms
Buy-Side
All Roads Lead to the Smart Router
Guest Contributor: Renée Colyer, CEO, Forefactor As if it wasn’t complicated enough before – now, because of the OPR (Order Protection Rule) in Canada, there are two types of smart order routers (venue and broker offered) that the buyside needs to understand. On top of that, the use of algorithms has prompted much confusion about
Buy-Side
Fragmentation v Consolidation
Guest Contributor: Steve Grob, Fidessa Seems like equity and other capital marketplaces are going through the ying and yang of fragmentation and consolidation. Just as we hear about another merger, we read about another new venue going live or more regulation encouraging competition. This provides market participants with a problem, especially in terms of understanding
Buy-Side
Exploring Public & Private Clouds
(Guest Contributor: Brian McCallion, global performance architect at AIG.) Cloud computing has essentially been private from the beginning. Google, for one, demonstrates that the world’s most successful search engine runs not on an IBM Power, Sun Enterprise, or other massively powerful machine engineered for business by the go-to vendors for computer solutions. More in keeping
Compliance
Dodd-Frank IT Implications for Investment Firms: Disaster Recovery, Archiving
Guest Contributor: Mary Beth Hamilton, Director of Marketing, Eze Castle Integration At 800+ pages, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act is far reaching and requires a serious time commitment to comb through. As the deadline approaches, investment firms are increasingly looking at the technology requirements outlined in the regulation and the implications
Compliance
Basel III: Planning for the Future
Guest Contributor: Joe Antocci, Account Manager, Avid Technical Resources While the world picks up the pieces caused by the destruction of the economic crisis, financial institutions face a variety of challenges – among these challenges is how to respond to the wave of new regulatory reform. Given that technology plays such a vital role in
Back-Office
So Much Desktop Virtualization, So Little Time…
Guest Contributor: Simon Rust, VP of Technology, AppSense With desktop virtualization expecting to achieve a revenue of $1.5 billion by 2014, an increasing number of financial institutions are investing a great amount of time and energy into this up and coming technology as they are beginning to see the value of centralized management to help
