By Andrew Delaney, Editor, A-Team Insight Quarterly, A-Team Group

NYSE Euronext’s new Advanced Trading Solutions group is setting out to offer standardised access to markets globally, while lowering the cost to clients of the technology infrastructures required to participate in today’s increasingly fast and electronic execution venues. Andrew Delaney talks with global technology head Larry Leibowitz (pictured, right) and NYSE TransactTools CEO Sam Johnson about their vision for universal market access.

Read the rest of this article in the June 2008 issue of A-Team IQ.

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By Andrew Delaney, Editor, A-Team Insight Quarterly, A-Team Group

It’s June, so it must be Sifma. A bit early this year, so we’ll all have to go back to work afterwards, rather than taking a much needed vacation in the Hamptons. But never mind, there’s lot’s to do. How come? Well, when we read the mainstream press, our hearts fill with gloom at the prospect of another downturn. Cancelled projects. Friends out of work. No more nice lunches. It’s just no fun.

Read the rest of this article in the June 2008 issue of A-Team IQ.

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By Maryann Houglet, Senior Vice President, Strategic Consulting, A-Team Group

A recent study by A-Team Group and GoldenSource finds that OTC derivatives are driving a wider move among firms to look again at their data management strategies, with surpirsing results.

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By Pete Harris, President Americas and Editor-at-Large, A-Team Group

Getting computers to compute faster and use less power is hitting a sweet spot with firms looking to not only out-run their competitors, but also to cut data centre footprint and power consumption. So who offers what to the market and what should anyone wanting to make gains from hardware acceleration be on the look out for?

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By James Hartley, Vice President of Research, A-Team Group

To get the most out of smart order routing and algorithmic trading the industry needs a standard set of definitions of what these functions actually are – that way you know who knows what they are talking about.

Read the rest of this article in the June 2008 issue of A-Team IQ.

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By Sharon Wilbraham, Contributing Editor, A-Team Group

In the face of increasing data volumes, greater regulatory demands, pressure to reduce costs and operational risk, could outsourced/managed reference data offerings prove to be the final piece in the puzzle?

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By Maryann Houglet, Senior Vice President, Strategic Consulting, A-Team Group

Centralising databases is only the beginning in the re-evaluation of data practices that is gripping the market. Ensuring downstream applications are integrated is proving challenging, but the drive to meet the needs of ever more complex instruments will make it succeed.

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By Virginie O’Shea, Contributing Editor, A-Team Group

Given the chequered history of previous attempts to force standards convergence, are the recent plans for an ‘investment roadmap’ doomed to failure, or is interoperability the answer to the industry’s problems?

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By Dr Mark D. Spiteri, Head of Software Development, Apama Products

The trading world has now definitively moved beyond single-venue trading. Notwithstanding which asset class you specialise in, and definitely if you are pursuing cross-asset class trading, the fact of the matter is that to be competitive you need to be connected to multiple venues. Reg NMS and MIFID might have made everyone more conscious of the requirement to provide best execution, but competitive pressures would have prevailed otherwise and compelled a similar response.

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By Roger Aitkin, Contributing Editor, A-Team Group

As the development of Gulf financial centres like Dubai, Bahrain and others continues apace, opportunities for financial technology suppliers appear ripe. A-Team Insight Quarterly examines how far local exchanges and regulators have been driving the modernisation of the region’s market infrastructure.

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By Pete Harris, President Americas/Editor at Large, A-Team Group

Israel’s high tech industries, developed from its military capabilities, are making a huge impression on the world’s banking, telecoms and even pop music industries. So what is the secret of what the West dubs ‘Silicon Wadi’?

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By Angela Wilbraham, Chief Executive Officer, A-Team Group

All eyes are on New York in June for one of the industry’s biggest events on the calendar – the Sifma Technology Management Conference. The theme of this year’s event, aptly enough, is ‘Managing IT in Financial Services during the Credit Crisis’. Banks are hurting, write downs are on an unprecedented scale, but the business of financial services IT continues on its path of innovation and dynamic change.

Read the rest of this article in the June 2008 issue of A-Team IQ.

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By Andrew Delaney, President & Editor-in-Chief, A-Team Group

MiFID is done and dusted. November came and went with nary a bother to speak of. There was no falling in of the sky. So, we don’t need to worry about MiFID anymore, right?

Wrong. To misquote our favourite and oft-repeated Churchillian phrase: November wasn’t the end. It wasn’t the beginning of the end. It was perhaps the end of the beginning.

We in Europe are living in a MiFID world. MiFID is now everything. It governs how investment services firms go about their business. And it reaches into other jurisdictions, meaning that while it’s an EU regulation, US Asian and other financial institutions are going to have to pay more and more attention to what it requires.

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By Maryann Houglet, Senior Vice President, Strategic Consulting, A-Team Group

In an age of ever-increasing demands for transparency, the spread of alternative investment strategies into the institutional asset management world means major data management and operational pain for more firms – and greater pressure on data and data management vendors to respond

On January 25 2008, SIFMA’s Asset Management Group announced that D.E. Shaw had been unanimously approved as a member. “The approval marks a milestone in that D.E. Shaw is the first hedge fund member of SIFMA,” read the official statement. On the same day, US stock markets closed sharply lower after some recovery, because of fears that, yet again, prominent hedge funds were in trouble.

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By Pete Harris, President Americas and Editor-at-Large, A-Team Group

Complex event/event stream processing is one hot area right now, and it’s predicted to get hotter still. So to which applications is this technology best suited, and what are your options when it comes to CEP/ESP implementation?

Truth be told, software engineers in the financial markets have been writing code to handle events since the year dot. A price update from an exchange, a trading limit that gets broken, a stock split. All are examples of events that might cause some software process to take place.

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By James Hartley, Vice President, Research, A-Team Group

Client and counterparty identification is a vital activity undertaken independently by every financial institution on the planet, yet despite the challenges created by the lack of a universal standard to smooth external communication about these entities, the IBEI initiative has stalled. So what will it take for the compelling need for the International Business Entity Identifier to be realised?

Face it – you need to know the financial trustworthiness and legal standing of your business associates. To ignore this simple axiom of trade and commerce could be tantamount to felonious collaboration or capital accessory. Probably not good.

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By Roger Aitken, Contributing Editor, A-Team Group

Turquoise is trying to shrug off its unfortunate Project Tortoise nickname and crank up the momentum behind its new MTF for pan-European trading, set for launch in September. CEO Eli Lederman reckons it’s the most exciting initiative in the market today. Here he tells A-Team IQ why

Since the earliest days of Project Turquoise in late 2006, sceptics have expressed doubts that the ambitious multilateral trading facility (MTF) with its integrated model of lit and dark order books would ever get off the ground. The slow progress of the investment bank-backed initiative in picking a technology provider, in appointing a chief executive and even in releasing any real detail about its plans earned it the unfortunate nickname Project Tortoise. An abortive attempt to tie up with UK alternative exchange Plus Markets didn’t help matters much either.

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…or the evolution of ‘soup to nuts’ applications

By Sharon Wilbraham, Contributing Editor, A-Team Group

With vendor consolidation taking place in the marketplace and both order management systems (OMSs) and execution management systems (EMSs) encroaching more and more on the ‘traditional’ role of the other with additional features and functionality, A-Team IQ asks whether the trend will continue, and if there will come a day when the dominant players in the market offer complete, soup to nuts applications on one screen – and whether those dominant players will originate from the EMS or the OMS space.

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By Roger Aitken, Contributing Editor, A-Team Group

With Sweden’s Cinnober bagging contracts to build trading platforms for Turquoise Trading in Europe and Project Alpha in Canada in a matter of days late in 2007, just how hot is financial technology sector innovation in the Nordic region?

In 1808 Russia invaded Sweden with the support of Napoleon. Fast forward 200 years to today, and Sweden is engaged in something of its very own foreign invasion, albeit with a far more commercial orientation and driven by technology developments spanning a wide range of industrial sectors. And it’s not just confined to the Swedes.

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By Thea George, Editorial Director, A-Team Group

When you’re embarking on a major post-trade infrastructure refresh, pick a solution that can coexist with your legacy set-up and enable you to migrate piece by piece and capitalise on opportunities for quick wins. That’s the message from T Rajah, CIO at Hong Kong-based broker CLSA

The presence of Thiyagarajah (T) Rajah, chief information officer at CLSA, on a panel discussing enterprise data management at Swift’s Sibos conference in Boston in October last year served as a strong indication of his belief in the importance of solving the reference data challenge.

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