CFTC, ICE Endex, Wall Street Horizon and Estimize also had FinTech news.
Firms Prep for New Margin Requirements
HSBC Private Bank and unnamed corporations and financial institutions have adopted Bloomberg’s MARS Collateral Management and reconciliation solution to help them meet new variation margin requirements for non-centrally cleared over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives, according to Bloomberg officials.
“It’s a business imperative to trade these types of instruments, so compliance too becomes a business imperative,” says Kpate Adjaoute, managing director at HSBC Private Bank (Suisse), in a prepared statement. “We anticipated that these reforms were coming. It helps to centralize the process and have access to the data we need, as well as the counterparties with whom we trade.ˮ
The Bloomberg MARS Collateral Management offering helps customers “centralize their collateral management workflow and automate how they manage and monitor risk exposure and collateral positions,” officials say. “It provides cross-product, cross-asset support for Dodd-Frank and EMIR compliance, effective capture of legal documentation, automated messaging, risk analytics and portfolio reconciliations.”
To complement MARS, Bloomberg has licensed ISDA’s Standard Initial Margin Model, or SIMM, for calculating initial margin to help trading desks and collateral managers calculate the amount of collateral that needs to be posted, officials say.
Bloomberg also provides a data license product and look-up feature on the Bloomberg Terminal {COLT<GO>} that helps investors identify collateral eligible to post in different jurisdictions. Bloomberg also provides aggregation and eligibility checking services for bilateral and triparty repo agreements, officials say.
CFTC Allows U.S. Access to ICE Endex Markets
The CFTC has issued an order of registration to ICE Endex Markets B.V. (ICE Endex), a foreign board of trade (FBOT) in Amsterdam, Netherlands that permits ICE Endex to provide its members or other participants located in the U.S. with direct access to its electronic order entry and trade matching system, officials say.
The CFTC has verified that the regulatory regime of the Netherlands Authority for the Financial Markets, which governs ICE Endex “satisfies the requirements for registration under CFTC regulations,” CFTC officials say.
“After reviewing the FBOT’s application, the CFTC determined that ICE Endex has demonstrated its ability to comply with the requirements of CFTC regulations, including CFTC regulation 48.8, which outlines the conditions of registration,” according to the CFTC. “This regulation also permits any additional conditions the CFTC deems necessary and may impose, after appropriate notice and opportunity to respond. ICE Endex shall also continue to fulfill each of the representations it made in support of its registration application.”
The CFTC issued the Order in accordance with Part 48 of the CFTC regulations, which provides that such an Order may be issued to a FBOT that satisfies the requirements for registration in CFTC regulation 48.7 and, among other things, possesses the attributes of an established, organized exchange and is subject to continued oversight by a regulator that provides comprehensive supervision and regulation that is comparable to the supervision and regulation exercised by the CFTC.
Wall Street Horizon & Estimize Form Partnership
Wall Street Horizon, a corporate events surveillance provider, and Estimize, a crowdsourced financials estimates platform, are partnering to provide datasets to each other’s platforms “in an effort to help investors find additional sources of alpha,” officials.
The partnership will give Wall Street Horizon Enchilada subscribers access to Estimize’s crowdsourced earnings and economic estimates, and Estimize’s clients will have access to Wall Street Horizon’s forward-looking earnings date calendar, officials say.
“Many of the world’s top quantitative and systematic investors use Wall Street Horizon’s and Estimize’s unique datasets in a variety of different ways to generate alpha,” according to their joint press release. “These firms rely on the accuracy of Wall Street Horizon’s earnings dates and Estimize’s earnings estimates to forecast upcoming volatility and directional movement in stock prices. By offering both on the same platform, clients can have a higher degree of confidence in their investment and trading strategies that are tied to corporate earnings.”
“Wall Street Horizon is as dedicated to forecasting earnings announcement dates as we are to forecasting earnings,” says Leigh Drogen, founder and CEO for Estimize.
Wall Street Horizon provides earnings dates, dividend dates, options expiration dates, splits, spinoffs and a wide variety of investor-related conferences. Estimize’s earnings estimates are crowdsourced from 40,000 regular contributors across the buy and sell-side, private investors, subject matter experts and academics.
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