In other news, SIX partners with Urgentem, Torstone hires from Interactive Brokers, and ComplyAdvantage has a new CTO.
DTC & Broadridge Score a Corporate Actions First
With help from Broadridge Financial Solutions, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. (DTCC) reports that it has taken a big step toward fully automating the corporate actions lifecycle via its subsidiary, The Depository Trust Company (DTC).
The DTC processed the “first-ever, fully-automated voluntary reorganization ISO 20022 instruction,” part of the recently automated Voluntary Reorganization service. The enhanced service is intended to increase straight through processing rates for voluntary corporate actions processing, cut the risks that come with manual errors, provide greater scalability, and help cut costs, officials say.
“The corporate events process has become increasingly complicated due to the rise in popularity of financial instruments including securitized derivatives and structured equities — both of which are typically backed by other securities or triggered by market conditions,” according to a DTCC statement. “Firms across the industry have turned to large teams of personnel to specifically oversee and monitor the voluntary instruction process, in part to reduce the risk of costly errors.”
The DTCC and Broadridge, which have 60 mutual corporate actions clients, tested the revamped Voluntary Reorganization service, which helps firms with managing and executing “corporate action instructions around time-sensitive events in a more streamlined and efficient manner,” according to the DTCC, which processes more than 600,000 reorganization instructions annually.
“Having end-to-end automation throughout the corporate actions lifecycle will allow the industry to utilize fixed data formats and a standardized set of rules, creating new efficiencies while reducing risks and costs,” says Ann Marie Bria, executive director, asset services business management at DTCC, in a prepared statement.
SIX Partners with Climate Risk Analytics Vendor
Swiss financial data and systems specialist SIX reports that it has entered into a partnership with Urgentem, a provider of carbon-emissions data and climate-risk analytics.
The partnership is intended to “support their clients in meeting climate-related requirements such as regulatory reporting of emissions data, tracking alignment to climate goals (Net Zero) and stress testing among many others.”
SIX is now offering Urgentem’s emissions data set, which “provides extensive granular level carbon emissions data of the largest 5,000+ global companies with modeled data available for 30,000+ securities – as well as Emission Reduction Targets and Temperature Score data sets,” the vendors say in a statement.
SIX points out that the “partnership represents the next step in the strategy of SIX to help its customers drive forward sustainable investing with data, providing consumption-ready data and analytics for more informed decisions. This builds on the SIX suite of tailored ESG data offerings, broadening its coverage of specialized ESG data sets.”
“With mounting pressures from regulators and investors, our data helps financial institutions adhere to new regulatory requirements, such as the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) and supports the implementation of strategies in the move towards global climate-related targets,” Urgentem CEO Girish Narula says in the statement.—L.Ch
Torstone Taps Interactive Brokers for Senior Post in Japan
Yasuaki Hayashi
Torstone Technology, which offers a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform for post-trade securities and derivatives processing and risk management, reports the appointment of Yasuaki Hayashi as senior Japan representative.
The appointment signals the “continued expansion of its Tokyo office as the firm grows in Asia,” the company says in a statement.
Hayashi “brings over thirty years of experience in the brokerage and investment banking industry, with significant expertise in establishing and growing businesses in Japan,” Torstone adds.
He joins from Interactive Brokers, where he was head of Japan, and helped to set up the firm’s Japanese business in 2008, per the statement. Prior to that, he was operations director at Liquidnet, “where he set up the firm’s Japanese business.”
Torstone Technology is headquartered in London, with offices in New York, Toronto, Hong Kong, Singapore and Tokyo,” per the statement.—L.Ch
ComplyAdvantage Names Chief Technology Officer
Mark Watson
ComplyAdvantage, a data technology company specializing in financial crime detection, reports that Mark Watson has been named the company’s chief technology officer (CTO).
Watson will lead “all engineering and technical innovation efforts including the expansion of ComplyData, the company’s “proprietary knowledge graph.” The vendor says ComplyData “contextualizes insights across the company’s … Transaction Risk Management and KYB solution sets.”
“We’ve spent the last eight years helping our customers find and mitigate the hidden threats of money-laundering and related financial crimes.” Charlie Delingpole, founder and CEO of ComplyAdvantage, declares in the statement.
Watson has more than 26 years of technology management experience, per the statement. He joins from WorldRemit, where he had been CTO since 2018.
Prior to WorldRemit, Watson “co-founded and exited several companies across a range of B2B businesses across a number of business sectors including mobile apps, cloud, advanced analytics, systems management, and customer experience management. In particular, [Watson] was the founder and technology leader at the mobile middleware pioneer, Volantis Systems, and subsequently at the machine learning-based cloud performance company, Skipjaq. He also led the technology function at the AI-based customer experience platform, Causata, through its sale to NICE Systems,” the statement points out.
ComplyAdvantage also produced the recent “State of Financial Crimes 2022 Report, Evolving Use and Sanctions,” and the “Anti-Money Laundering Guide for Growing Crypto Firms.” — L.Ch
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