Our FinTech update features items about Drawbridge Partners, the COVID-19 links for regulators, ZUBR, Standard Chartered, and Cassini Systems.
Itiviti & ECS Partner to Bolster NYFIX Matching
SWIFT headquarters
Itiviti, a technology and service provider to financial institutions, reports the advent of a partnership with ECS Fin, a provider of financial messaging services and transaction-processing solutions, that will add trade settlement to NYFIX Matching.
The partnership, Itiviti says, will enable NYFIX Matching to process trade messages with custodians via all networks including SWIFT.
Itiviti characterizes NYFIX Matching as a “post-trade affirmation, confirmation and matching service that provides the buy-side … the capability to streamline their post-trade workflow, which handles the matching and repair of block allocations by the broker with the internal systems of the buy-side firm.”
Itiviti adds that it will be able to notify customers of trade status in real-time and equip them to take immediate action, “thereby minimizing breaks.”
“Working with ECS Fin was a logical next step for Itiviti’s post-trade platform, NYFIX Matching,” says Jason Landauer, Itiviti ’s head of network sales, in a prepared statement. “With this partnership, NYFIX Matching can now support execution all the way to settlement.”
Itiviti, owned by Nordic Capital, notes that it currently serves approximately 2,000 clients in more than 50 countries.
Drawbridge Partners Names an MD for Europe
Simon Eyre
Drawbridge Partners reports that it has named Simon Eyre head of its recently opened European headquarters in London. Eyre will lead Drawbridge’s engineering, product and customer engagement teams across Europe, the firm says.
Drawbridge Partners characterizes itself as a “cybersecurity software and services firm specializing in the needs of hedge fund and private equity managers.”
Based in London, Eyre is an industry veteran, who brings “more than 20 years of IT governance, technology architecture, cybersecurity and corporate strategy experience to Drawbridge,” the provider points out, adding that, most recently, he was director of information security at Edge Technology Group.
U.S. Regulators Set Up COVID-19 Pages
Major regulators for the capital markets of the U.S. financial services industry have been busy reacting to requests for regulatory relief and other actions related to the Corona virus pandemic that has caused a new chapter of market volatility.
FTF News is providing a short list of shortened links to the special pages that the regulators have set up to delineate all that they are doing amid the pandemic. The guidances, policy shifts and regulatory adjustments will be ongoing during this crisis.
The regulators’ pages are listed in alphabetical order:
- CFTC: https://bit.ly/33UYRQO
- FINRA: https://bit.ly/2Jp37P0
- NY State Dept. of Financial Services: https://on.ny.gov/2UMHL3v
- SEC: https://bit.ly/3dH3pPm
- Treasury Department: https://bit.ly/2vZ6TM0
New Digital Derivatives Exchange Launches
ZUBR, which characterizes itself as a new high-performance exchange for digital asset derivatives, has begun operations. Officials behind the effort point out that it has “seen a cumulative trading volume of more than US$25million since going live.”
ZUBR notes that it “offers perpetual contracts on cryptocurrencies with up to 20x leverage, microseconds of [sic] the execution speed, London-based colocation and professional algorithmic trading infrastructure as a service available to all clients.”
Officials add that ZUBR “publishes regular reports and analytics examining price fluctuations, volumes, price discovery, trading patterns and other market problems.”
Standard Chartered Creates Financing & Securities Services Unit
Standard Chartered recently announced that it will be combining the Securities Services group, now within the Transaction Banking division, with the Portfolio Risk Management unit in the financial markets business to form the new Financing and Securities Services unit.
The bank has also appointed Margaret Harwood-Jones, the current global head of Securities Services, to co-head the new unit with Emmanuel Ramambason, who is the global head of Portfolio Risk Management, officials say. Both Harwood-Jones and Ramambason will report to Roberto Hoornweg, global head of Financial Markets.
“This combination will allow greater alignment of our Prime business within Portfolio Risk Management, and harmonize our offering in financing, custody and clearing, as well as fund services for our clients,” Hoornweg says in a prepared statement. “It will also further enhance the synergy between Financial Markets and Transaction Banking within our Corporate, Commercial and Institutional Banking business, to ensure we are fully equipped, relevant, and best-placed to service our clients.”
The Financing and Securities Services group will encompass existing Securities Services activities including custody, clearing, fiduciary and fund services, and securities lending, and Portfolio Risk Management activities across prime services, money markets, central funding desk, credit valuation adjustment and the modelling and analytics group, officials say.
Cassini Taps SmartStream for Head of APAC Office
Greg Ballesty
Cassini Systems, a pre- and post-trade margin analytics vendor for derivatives transactions, broke ground in Asia Pacific via a new office in Sydney, Australia, and has hired an industry veteran from SmartStream Technologies to run the office.
“The move follows the recent onboarding of a large Australian asset manager and significant interest in Cassini’s services from other firms in Australia as well as throughout the region,” according to a statement from the vendor.
The vendor has hired Greg Ballesty who has joined Cassini as product specialist, APAC to oversee the firm’s product efforts in Australia and the APAC region, officials say.
At SmartStream, Ballesty served as senior risk manager in Singapore and Australia, officials say. He also served as sales director for Lombard Risk in Singapore; and as a contractor for Thomson Reuters in Sydney. He began his career at Commonwealth Bank of Australia, where he advanced to the position of chief dealer. He has more than four decades of experience in derivatives, banking, collateral management and risk management.
Cassini’s headquarters are in London and it has an office in New York City.
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