Climate change, a.k.a. global warming, and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) concerns are getting real for financial services firms, particularly those working in securities trading. This is also true for the regulators overseeing them such as the SEC. A case in point is our story this week about a $247 billion pension fund, the New… Read More >>
Firms May Need to Revamp AML Policies: Report
U.S. banks may need to update their anti-money-laundering (AML) policies as a result of key provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2021 (NDAA), which primarily covers appropriations for the U.S. Department of Defense programs, activities, and military personnel. However, the NDAA also covers many “matters relating to foreign nations,” according to the overview… Read More >>
Climate Change Puts Banks at Risk: NYS DFS
“Climate change is happening now, and we have to take steps to manage the financial risks now,” says Linda A. Lacewell, the superintendent of the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYS DFS). “We simply can’t wait any longer to deal with it. “We want to ensure that every institution is managing its own… Read More >>
Firms Spending More to Counter Cyber-Attacks: Survey
The COVID-19 infection risk has impacted all parts of society, from young children in kindergarten to elders in nursing homes. The pandemic’s very real risk means that many employees have to work remotely, too, often from home and often on their personal laptops or desktop computers, which sometimes are imperfectly protected from online threats. And… Read More >>
ISITC’s Workaround for SWIFT & Negative Trading Prices
The Derivatives Working Group of ISITC, a securities industry standards group, is helping to spotlight a problem that has gotten lost in the shuffle of a pandemic and sudden recession. Essentially, how do users of the SWIFT financial messaging network process negative trading prices on commodity futures? “The effort was spurred by recent market event… Read More >>
Cboe Postpones Trading Floor Reopening
Cboe Global Markets has postponed the re-opening of its “South Loop” trading floor until Monday, June 15, a week later than previously announced. The reopening of the officially named Cboe Options Exchange (C1) trading floor “was previously scheduled for Monday, June 8, 2020,” according to the latest Cboe statement. “The decision to postpone the reopening… Read More >>
Morningstar Credit Ratings Settles Conflict-of-Interest Case
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission reports that it has settled with New York-based credit-rating agency Morningstar Credit Ratings, which it charged with violating a long-standing conflict-of-interest rule designed to separate a firm’s credit ratings and analysis from its sales and marketing. Morningstar Credit Ratings, a subsidiary of Morningstar, Inc., neither admits nor denies the… Read More >>
DTCC Tests DLT’s Usage for Post-Trade Ops
Post-trade infrastructure provider the Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. has launched two experiments — dubbed Project Ion and Project Whitney — that are collaborative industry efforts to investigate how distributed ledger technology (DLT) might strengthen post-trade processes such as the elimination of manual processes in the private markets, and new securities settlement via public markets,… Read More >>
IBM & TR Offer Regulatory Change Management Solution
IT systems giant IBM and the Regulatory Intelligence group at Thomson Reuters (TR) have joined forces to provide financial services firms with a regulatory change management solution that will help them digitize governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) processes, automating access to more than 900 regulatory bodies and 2,500 collections of regulatory and legislative materials, officials… Read More >>
DTCC Bolsters Support for SFTR Reporting via Partnerships
Financial services firms are gearing up for the reporting requirements of the Securities Financing Transaction Regulation (SFTR), and the DTCC is partnering with EquiLend, Trax, IHS Markit and Pirum to improve its global trade reporting capabilities before the SFTR rules take effect by the end of next year. Even though SFTR originated with the European… Read More >>
