Our FinTech roundup includes news from Northern Trust and A.I., Pico’s Co-CEO, RJO & Greenstone Systems, and Ideal Prediction’s CTO.
NYSE President Announces Floor Reopening via WSJ
Stacey Cunningham
The open outcry trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) will partially reemerge “slowly and carefully” on May 26, according to Stacey Cunningham, president of the NYSE, who made the announcement via an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal, published May 14
The return of the NYSE floor follows the May 4 partial reopening of the NYSE Arca Options Trading Floor in San Francisco.
“I hear every day from companies eager to return. We’ll do so this month, slowly and carefully,” Cunningham says in the piece.
“As for the NYSE, we will reopen our trading floor to a subset of floor brokers the day after Memorial Day,” Cunningham says. “We opted to close our floor temporarily in the early days of the pandemic to help slow the spread of disease. Two months later, we’ve learned a lot and are in a position to reopen the floor with vital new safety measures, as we begin working together to restart the U.S. economy.”
The reopened floor “will look different from the iconic images so many have grown accustomed to seeing televised throughout the trading day,” Cunningham says. The designated market makers will do largely continue to do their jobs away from the floor. During our floor closure, we demonstrated that these larger companies can operate effectively with remote connectivity,” she says.
The floor brokers will “wear protective masks as they work. They will also follow strict social-distancing requirements, enforced by a new choreography that defines the space where each person may work on the floor,” Cunningham says. “The NYSE will also require all comers to avoid public transportation, which will limit their exposure and preserve capacity for others.”
Floor brokers and visitors “will be screened and have their temperatures taken as they enter the building. Those who don’t pass the check won’t be allowed to enter until they test negative for Covid-19 or self-quarantine in accordance with federal guidelines,” Cunningham says. “The rest of the building will remain largely empty.”
The full text of the piece can be found here https://on.wsj.com/2AvaLq4 .
Northern Trust Improves Currency Hedging Via A.I.
Northern Trust is improving its foreign exchange (FX) currency management solutions via machine learning models that detect data outliers, officials say.
The machine learning models are “designed to enable greater oversight of thousands of daily data points and help reduce risk throughout the currency management lifecycle,” according to the service provider.
The solution has been developed with help from partner Lumint Corp., officials add. Northern Trust announced its partnership with Lumint in 2018 with a focus on currency hedging.
“The advanced technology, utilized by the Robotic Oversight System (ROSY) for Northern Trust, systematically scans newly arriving, anonymized data to identify anomalies across multi-dimensional data sets,” according to Northern Trust. “It is built on machine learning models developed by Lumint using a cloud platform that allows for highly efficient data processing.”
The detection of data outliers helps Northern Trust to “enhance our oversight and risk management, which can be particularly important in volatile markets,” says Andy Lemon, head of currency management at Northern Trust, in a prepared statement.
Northern Trust’s usage of ROSY “amplifies the scalability of its already highly automated currency hedging operation; especially for the more sophisticated products such as look-through hedging offered to its global clients,” says Alex Dunegan, CEO of Lumint, in a statement.
Northern Trust’s currency management suite consists of a portfolio overlay, share class hedging and look through hedging solutions, officials say.
Pico Names Co-Chief Executive Officer
Jarrod Yuster
Pico, a provider of technology services for financial services markets, reports that Frank Troise will join the firm as co-chief executive officer with Jarrod Yuster, Pico’s chairman, CEO, and founder.
Troise’s most recent position was as the president and CEO of Investment Technology Group (ITG).
Prior to joining ITG, he was a managing director at JPMorgan and head of JPMorgan Execution Services. Before JPMorgan, he was a managing director at Barclays Capital and at Lehman Brothers. Troise has been on the board of directors of Pico since September 2019 and will continue in that capacity.
RJO & Greenstone Systems Focus on Agri-Tech Link
Chicago-based R.J. O’Brien & Associates, (RJO) the futures brokerage and clearing firm, and Greenstone Systems, a provider of agricultural accounting and management software, jointly report that RJO’s Hrvyst initiative and Greenstone will “digitally connect and automate origination, merchandising and hedging for U.S. grain companies.”
The new integration “will be piloted at several locations throughout the country with broad commercial availability expected this summer,” officials say.
The companies note that Hrvyst is a “purpose-built agri-tech application created by RJO for the commercial grain industry that automates hedging by digitizing the entire grain origination and merchandising process. It electronically links grain offers, purchases and sales to the futures market and to the grain company’s Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. The platform is broker-agnostic so it can be used by commercial grain elevators and linked to their existing brokerage firms.”
The companies also note that Greenstone’s MyGrower mobile platform “enables growers to access real-time account information from the AGRIS ERP system anywhere, anytime. It seamlessly connects growers to their elevators so they can operate their business on-the-go. AGRIS is the most widely used ERP system in the U.S. grain industry.”
“Grain companies are forced to rely on manual processes to string together disconnected workstreams for buying or selling grain and managing hedges,” Kirk Bonniwell, senior managing director of Hrvyst, says in the statement from the companies. “This kills productivity and introduces unnecessary risks. Too often, it also contributes to missed origination and merchandising opportunities. Integrating the Hrvyst and Greenstone platforms mitigates those risks and offers the grain industry an opportunity for straight-through processing capabilities enjoyed by other industries for years.”
Greenstone is part of Cultura Technologies, owned by Constellation Software, Inc., which the statement characterizes as an “international vertical market software specialist.”
Ideal Prediction Names a CTO
Ideal Prediction, a trading analysis, and data science company for capital markets, has appointed Walter Bell as its chief technology officer (CTO).
He has “more than 20 years of experience in capital markets, working in a variety of roles across multiple asset classes,” the firm says in a statement.
Bell joined from Bank of America Merrill Lynch where he was the global head of rates etrading quants, per the firm. Prior to this, he managed technology teams in efx development, cross asset trading and global arbitrage trading at Credit Suisse. Earlier in his career he was a senior product manager at Broadway Technology.
“Walter is one of the best inventors I’ve met in my career. His expertise in systems architecture and algorithmic trading is a powerful, rare combination,” John Crouch, founder and CEO of Ideal Prediction, says in a prepared statement.
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