JPMorgan Securities (JPMS), UBS Financial Services, and TradeStation Securities have settled charges made by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that they failed to keep pace with the ever-changing and growing threat of identity theft. The SEC is alleging that the trio had deficient efforts to prevent customer identity theft and thus violated the “Identity… Read More >>
Credit Suisse Partners with ‘Girls Who Code’ & Other News
Credit Suisse Hosts Summer Immersion Program Credit Suisse reports that it’s a corporate sponsor of a virtual Summer Immersion Program for Girls Who Code, a nonprofit group focused on ending the gender gap in technology. “Credit Suisse will host a two-week program where students in high school will have an opportunity to build the technical… Read More >>
Titanium CEO Pleads Guilty to $21M Crypto Fraud
Is $21 million scammed from would-be cryptocurrency investors worth up to two decades behind bars? The 54-year-old chief executive officer of Titanium Blockchain Infrastructure Services Inc. (TBIS) might have the next 20 years to ponder his answer to that fraught question. He’ll probably learn much more about his fate on November 18 of this year,… Read More >>
Snowflake to Host Cboe’s Data Framework & Other News
Cboe to Send Data & Analytics to the Cloud Exchanges company Cboe Global Markets reports that it is moving its corporate data and analytics from onsite systems to the cloud via Snowflake’s Data Cloud. Cboe officials say that they are making the change to bring “speed, scalability, and efficiency” to Cboe’s management of internal, proprietary data… Read More >>
Are We Heading Toward the Age of DLT?
I think it’s fair to say that distributed ledger technology (DLT), a.k.a. the blockchain, is making real inroads into the complex universe of post-trade securities operations. I am referring to the infrastructure-building/plumbing aspects of DLT, which emerged before its role in the wild embrace of crypto- and digital asset transactions, tokenization, etc. The DLT-based systems… Read More >>
Equitable Pays $50M to Resolve Annuity Fees Case
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) reports that it has charged Equitable Financial Life Insurance Company with fraud, “for providing account statements to about 1.4 million variable annuity investors that included materially misleading statements and omissions concerning investor fees.” Equitable has agreed to compensate harmed investors, most of whom are public school teachers and staff… Read More >>
Jefferies Embarks Upon a Major Overhaul
Investment bank Jefferies Financial Group has embarked upon a major overhaul of its business lines in an effort to bolster its core of investment banking and capital markets. But a lot of shifting and shuffling has to happen first, including the combining of Jefferies Group LLC into Jefferies Financial Group Inc. “Jefferies expects to streamline and… Read More >>
SEC’s New Proxy Adviser Rule Stirs Old Woes
The SEC’s recent 3-2 vote to undo key provisions of a Trump-era rule governing proxy advisory firms has fanned the flames of controversy even though the stated goal was to bolster the independence and timeliness of these providers’ offerings. In fact, a major proxy-advice vendor, Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS), wanted the SEC to rescind the… Read More >>
BNY & Goldman Sachs Test Drive DLT & Other News
BNY & Goldman Sachs Pioneer DLT-Based Securities Financing BNY Mellon and Goldman Sachs have “completed the industry’s first agency securities lending transactions” via the distributed ledger technology (DLT) platform of HQLAᵡ , a financial technology vendor focused on securities finance and repo transactions. “As part of the combined series of 35-day term transactions with a… Read More >>
Should Risk & Resilience for Ops Be One?
Should the securities operations industry rethink the gap between operational resilience and operational risk? Should those working in operations bring the two disciplines closer together, and by doing so, develop a stronger architecture for securities operations? Those are the questions that Guy Warren, CEO at ITRS Group, is pondering and he wants you to ponder… Read More >>