Stay healthy, stay safe, and, if you’re eligible, please vote in the FTF Awards.
Grygo is the chief content officer for FTF
It’s awards season for Hollywood and, by the way, for the securities operations industry as FTF has just unveiled the nominees for the 2021 FTF News Technology Innovation Awards.
This is the 11th year for the FTF Awards, and our categories and honors have evolved along with the many shifts in financial markets and across the globe. In keeping with this tradition, we launched a new category for this cycle. The Best Systems Integrator Amid the COVID-19 Crisis honor reflects how solution providers responded to their financial services customers and the harsh realities of the pandemic.
The new category notes, that the “onset of the global pandemic caused Ops teams to quickly transform themselves so that they could work remotely and have greater mobility in response to lockdown challenges. … Some of the top areas of concern were support for remote trading and operations, business continuity, secure conferencing systems, reliable virtual private networks (VPNs), and efficient cloud computing.”
The pandemic has put this industry to the test and this award is an effort to reward those who went above and beyond amid a crisis. The nominees are CIA Omnigage; Financial Risk Solutions (FRS); Risclarity; and Siepe.
While we will create and retire categories as we go, we have stuck to one basic premise — industry participants should nominate industry participants, and then these peers should pick the winners in each competitive category. We thoroughly vet the voters, create a short list for the nominees, and then let the voters pick the ultimate winners. The only award that is not voted upon is the Editor’s Choice award. We think this process allows the best judges in the industry to pick the winners.
We have many awards categories, including those that shine the spotlight on outstanding companies such as:
- The Service Provider of the Year: This honor rewards the provider for “advancing the delivery of service, extraordinary client support, new synergies with key market participants, and extraordinary leadership in the industry. The winner in this category must be able to show that it boosted the fortunes of its clients.” The nominees: Adhesion Wealth; InvestCloud, Financial Supermarket division (formerly Tegra118); Qomply; Solovis; and TriOptima.
- Software Solution of the Year: This award recognizes the software application or software system that in 2020 broke new ground in a major area of securities operations. The winning solution must argue for its business benefits: Calypso; CompatibL; Exactpro; Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS); Imagine Software; Murex | MX.3 platform; and Numerix Oneview.
We also want the FTF Awards to honor individuals that have really advanced key aspects of securities operations. For instance, we have established the following categories:
- Fintech Person of the Year: This award focuses on “a behind-the-scenes individual that has been highly effective in advancing a financial technology issue that has had a major impact upon the industry. The person to be honored has devoted much time and effort toward proliferating a new standard, a key technology initiative, a regulatory-related project or a technology breakthrough that benefits the industry.” Our nominees are: Arjun Jayaram, CEO and founder, Baton Systems; Blair Williams, managing director, Risk and Technology Services, SS&C Technologies; Rupert Brown, CTO and founder for Evidology Systems; Sanjeev Kumar, CEO for Skience; and Stella Clarke, Chief Marketing Officer for Murex.
- Ops Business Person of the Year: This award honors an executive-level individual who has advanced the cause of financial technology innovation from the business side of the aisle. The winner of this award can be from a solution provider, an end-user firm, or a related consultancy committed to improving operations for financial services firms. The winner must demonstrate that he or she has effectively worked with IT managers and staff. The nominees are Cheryl Nash, CEO for the Financial Supermarket division of InvestCloud; Chris Bruner, head of U.S. Institutional Fixed Income, Tradeweb U.S. Institutional sector; David Brown, chief operating officer (COO) for IPC; Olga Orekhvo, COO for CompatibL; and Sameer Shalaby, CEO for Hazeltree.
We congratulate all of the 2021 FTF Award Nominees. Now that the nominations are complete, we are launching the voting process, which will run until May 14.
As for the very popular FTF Awards Gala, we hope that we will be able to celebrate together sometime in 2021 at the lovely Loeb Boathouse in Manhattan’s Central Park. But a great deal depends on how the world progresses in bringing an end to the pandemic.
So, stay healthy, stay safe, and, if you’re eligible, please vote in the FTF Awards.
The full list of nominees and categories can be found here: https://bit.ly/2XHU5nq
Please vote via this link: http://bit.ly/30fgiuE
Need a Reprint?