In other news, FINOS has its first CTO, a Norwegian firm clouds up, and MayStreet embraces 19 Asia-Pacific markets.
IFAD Offers Hedging for Murban Oil
Investment banking giant Morgan Stanley & Co. has joined the ICE Futures Abu Dhabi Exchange (IFAD), a new trading venue of exchanges operator Intercontinental Exchange, Inc. (ICE), officials say. Morgan Stanley will be an exchange and clearing member.
To offer ways to trade and hedge Murban crude oil, ICE launched IFAD on March 29, offering support in ICE Murban Crude Oil Futures and 18 Murban-related cash-settled derivatives and inter-commodity spreads, ICE officials say. “Produced by ADNOC Onshore, Murban is the UAE’s largest crude by volume, with daily production capacity of up to 2 million barrels.”
IFAD reports it has “29 Exchange Members and 22 Clearing Members, who are listed in full on IFAD’s Membership page,” according to IFAD. “Clearing members stand behind all trades made through IFAD and cleared by ICE Clear Europe, whether it is for the account of a customer, member, or their own account.”
In addition, “Murban futures are open for trading for 24 hours a day on Mondays and 22 hours a day Tuesdays to Fridays, with investors from jurisdictions including Abu Dhabi Global Market, the United States, Singapore, UK, Switzerland, the Netherlands, France, Norway, Australia, Japan and South Korea, able to trade on IFAD,” officials say.
In addition to trading venues, ICE offers data, technology, and market infrastructure support.
FINOS Appoints First CTO
Jane Gavronsky
Credit Suisse veteran Jane Gavronsky is slated to become the first chief technology officer (CTO) for the Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS), a nonprofit dedicated to the adoption of open source technology, open standards, and collaborative software development practices for the financial services industry.
In her most recent role as managing director for Credit Suisse, she served as head of data services, hosting and data services technology and led the global reference data services organization, officials say.
Gavronsky also “established bank-wide strategy definition for Data Services, delivery of data analytics and big data access services, and data quality programs; and implemented multi-year technical platform transformations and legacy retirement initiatives,” officials say.
Gavronsky’s new mandate is “to work closely with FINOS members to develop and implement open source solutions to address the most prominent problems across the financial services ecosystem. As CTO, Jane will focus on generating industry engagement and facilitating efforts across several focus areas, initially including data, regulatory compliance, and cloud certification,” FINOS reports.
“It’s my goal to help FINOS realize its mission to solve common business problems in financial services through open source innovation to the benefit of the entire industry,” Gavronsky says in a prepared statement.
Norwegian Investment Bank Moves Ops to the Cloud
Norwegian investment bank, Fearnley Securities, reports that it is applying cloud computing to its securities operations “by transitioning to a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution in a private cloud,” officials say.
The bank is using vendor TietoEVRY “to deliver its new SaaS Securities Trading platform” to run the “operations related to securities trading and settlement … with capabilities for future scaling, substantial cost-savings, and easier day-to-day IT operations,” officials say.
A longtime TietoEVRY customer, Fearnley Securities had been using “the ProBroker on-premise solution for their securities brokerage operation,” officials say.
“Moving one of our core systems to SaaS is part of our overall new IT strategy,” says Olav Amlie, deputy chief technology officer (CTO) at Fernley Securities, in a statement.
“We want to take the full advantage of cloud and outsource applications like ProBroker. We reviewed the market for other alternative vendors and solutions but decided to stay with ProBroker as it continues to represent the best fit for our needs,” Amlie says. “Now, moving over to a SaaS agreement with TietoEVRY, our IT team can concentrate on the areas where they have more expertise and can add more value. By taking this step into the cloud, we also expect to become more agile and efficient in our operations.”
Fearnley Securities, part of Astrup Fearnley Group, serves clients from offices in Oslo and New York, which includes major institutional investors, family-offices, financial sponsors, and select high net worth individuals, officials say.
TietoEVRY is based in Uusimaa, Finland.
MayStreet Expands Asia-Pacific Coverage
Market data technology and content provider MayStreet has increased the number of Asia-Pacific exchange feeds available in its Market Data Lake, opening up the repository to 19 new markets.
The Market Data Lake offers “global exchange data to fuel pre-trade, trading and post-trade analytics,” vendor officials say.
The new content “includes real-time and historical consolidated, top-of-book and full depth-of-book data” from equity, derivatives, commodity, and fixed income exchanges in the Asia-Pacific region.
The new Asia-Pacific markets added are: Australia: Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) and Chi-X Australia; Hong Kong: Hong Kong Futures Exchange (HKFE) and Hong Kong Stock Exchange (HKSE); India: BSE India and India INX; Japan: Chi-X Japan, Nagoya Stock Exchange, Osaka Exchange, Tokyo Commodity Exchange (TOCOM), Tokyo Stock Exchange and SBI Japannext: Korea: KRX, KOSDAQ, KOSCOM; Malaysia: Bursa Malaysia (CME Globex 3.0); Singapore: Singapore Exchange (SGX), ICE Futures Singapore; and Taiwan: Taiwan Futures Exchange (TAIFEX)
“With the addition of the new APAC exchange feeds to the Market Data Lake, MayStreet has also expanded its data center footprint globally,” officials add. “MayStreet’s data capture technology is now co-located within nearly every major exchange data center and relay point around the world.”
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