At Swift’s last Sibos conference in Boston – way back in 1994 – one of the big questions being asked was whether Swift could ever realise its ambition to be a key player in the securities markets. While I’d be the last to ever suggest that things move slowly in this business, it has to be said that this same question is probably being discussed around you if you’re reading this at Sibos Boston 2007. Yes, great strides have been made in terms of growing volumes of securities related messages, and Swift now offers a range of solutions targeted at specific securities related problems. But, as Campos admits in our interview, Swift still has not achieved the penetration it craves and needs on the buy side of the securities market, particularly among that most powerful driver of today’s trading business, the hedge fund community.

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The “standard” data models landscape is an unholy mess – and it’s up to you as practitioners to sort it out

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

This article isn’t about the size “00” models on runways and advertising globally – even the fashion industry is voluntarily putting an end to that. Instead, let’s focus on the data and processing models that drive your business and affect your pay cheque. Paying attention?

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Corporate actions have officially entered the enterprise data management fold, but how long will it take to change behaviour and get real results out to end users?

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

Have you ever wished corporations would maintain the status quo and not continually announce change? This would certainly simplify workflow for those that handle corporate actions and announcements – usually the operations departments of financial institutions. Corporate actions cover a lot of territory and carry a lot of risk. They are homogeneous neither across items nor across geographic boundaries. Holders of the underlying assets benefit from the diligence institutions apply to this data. Recognising the work that corporate actions entail, one manager told A-Team: “Payments are the easy part.”

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What are the factors to be considered when setting up an electronic derivatives trading business in Asia?

By Christopher Morris

At the annual Singapore FOW conference back in October 2005, delegates were awash with trepidation and excitement in equal measure. The Singapore Exchange (SGX) had made the strategic decision to move all legacy open outcry trading across to an electronic trading platform. A former floor broker wandered around the exhibition floor trying to convince every delegate he met. “I don’t know why SGX are closing the floor,” he said. “It might have worked in Europe, but Asia has a whole different way of doing business.”

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Web 2.0 is gaining momentum in the wider world, but what might it mean for the financial markets?

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

Remember the dot com bubble of the late 1990s, as the internet spawned myriad websites, pushed new business models and made millionaires out of many tech geeks? Well, for some of those geeks, it’s happening all over again, with the focus this time on interactive applications relying heavily on users themselves forming part of the offering. It’s called Web 2.0 and it’s gaining momentum on what will surely be a ride as wild as we all saw last time.

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Long the heir apparent to his predecessor Lenny Schrank, Lázaro Campos has finally taken the helm at Swift. Here he tells A-Team IQ how he plans to build on its franchise to better meet the needs of its customers in the securities industry

By Thea George

When we meet Lázaro Campos at Swift’s La Hulpe headquarters in August, he recalls that he received the news of his appointment as the co-operative’s new CEO on a Tuesday. “I was just about to give a presentation to 400 people,” he says. “I didn’t tell anyone at the time, except my wife.”

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Those firms that invest in trading technology for OTC derivatives are being rewarded with higher market shares. So how is electronic trading for complex instruments progressing?

By Andrew Delaney

Just when you thought it was safe… There’s a credit crunch to spoil the derivatives party. Well, not a party exactly. More like a warm, fuzzy feeling. A feeling that – contrary to the doomsayers’ predictions around the time of the great Orange County OTC derivatives disaster that these little-understood instruments would bring down the whole house of cards – the use of over-the-counter derivative securities to lay off risk had become an accepted part of wholesale market practice.

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Firms on both buy and sell sides want to do more OTC derivatives and structured products trading, and indeed in light of the credit crunch have had no choice but to do so. But how can they ensure that back office bottlenecks don’t put a brake on trading strategies?

By Thea George

The credit derivatives confirmations backlog that kicked off the past years’ focus on improving straight-through processing (STP) for OTC derivatives is somewhat old hat these days – or, more accurately, it was, until the “credit crunch” provoked a surge in volumes and back offices started to creak under the strain again.

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An interview with Richard W Brown, business manager, Reuters NewsScope

Reuters news reaches a billion people a day – but it is also read by an increasing number of machines. As “machine-readable news” comes of age, firms of all sizes and trading styles are discovering how it can benefit their research, analysis and algo-trading activities.

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With the exponential rise of algorithmic trading in the US and European markets seemingly affirmed, how far beyond equities and into the Asian markets can it go?

By Roger Aitken

The use of algorithmic trading strategies has grown rapidly in Europe during 2006 and into this year. An Edhec Risk Advisory survey revealed recently that 78 per cent of buy side firms were using algorithms, versus 58 per cent in 2004. Certainly, more firms have access to algorithmic trading systems, yet it appears that they still only use them for a small percentage of trades. Edhec’s preliminary survey findings highlight that algorithm deployment among European buy side firms accounted for just three per cent of business, compared to 11 per cent for direct market access (DMA) and 17 per cent for programme trading.

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DTCC/Thomson Financial JV Omgeo may have an “enviable” position in the securities trade processing and reference data space, but its CEO Marianne Brown remains impatient for it to capitalise on some urgent opportunities

By Thea George

As the end of her first year as president and chief executive officer of trade processing and reference data specialist Omgeo approaches, Marianne Brown believes the market environment represents a greater opportunity for her company today even than it did back when Omgeo was created, in the midst of the industry’s preoccupation with preparing for the US market’s move to T+1 settlement. “Our opportunity today is twofold,” she says; “to continue to penetrate individual markets as they move towards STP, and to enable cross-border transaction processing globally.”

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The good news is, the front office is starting to really care about corporate actions data. But does that mean more projects to automate handling of corporate actions further downstream will get the green light?

By Thea George

When, oh when, is the industry finally going to get to grips with the challenge of better automating the processing of corporate actions? It is now some seven years since the issue of the need to implement STP for corporate actions, typically a manual and therefore risk prone area of the back office, first came to the fore, and there has been a steady stream of conferences and articles on the subject ever since. And it is not as if the industry lacks the necessary tools for the job.

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How long will we have to wait for the European cross-border corporate actions processing environment to become as harmonised as Europe’s trading environment under MiFID?

By Richard Newbury

It’s November 1957 and the British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, has announced that the UK has applied to join the European Economic Community. The London Stock Exchange is to have all of its trading moved to IBM’s new 305 RAMAC computers and paper ledgers and messengers will no longer be used.

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As the commercial benefits of improving management of counterparty data become more apparent, and new sources of data and systems for centralising it emerge, counterparty data is rapidly losing its status as the poor relation of the reference data family

By Sharon Wilbraham

As financial institutions have largely been left to their own devices to find internal, often manual, methods to manage and utilise counterparty data over the years, many inconsistencies have arisen throughout the industry.

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This story begins and ends with digging. When Monnet and Schuman conceived the idea of the European Union and the Treaty of Rome was signed in 1957, the aspiration was to ensure the freedom of movement of goods, persons, services and capital, and the Common Market started with goods – iron ore and coal dug from the ground to be precise. Thirty years later, the progress towards the creation of a single market for all four domains was accelerated by the passage of the Single European Act in 1986, which introduced qualified majority voting and the principle of mutual recognition (needed to ensure harmonisation of the laws within each Member State). Subsequent discussions on creating a single market in financial services resulted in the tabling of a framework for action called the Financial Services Action Plan (FSAP) which was published in May 1999. The motivation for doing this was economic and threefold; first, to ensure that capital could be raised more easily by European companies intending to start up or innovate; second, that supply and demand for capital could be matched more effectively; and third, to ensure that consumers EU-wide could access a far greater choice of financial products.

By Anthony Kirby

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The Securities Technology Analysis Center (STAC) recently tested version 1.2 of the Exegy Ticker Plant (XTP), a hardware-accelerated solution for direct exchange feed integration. The detailed report is available at www.STACresearch.com.

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With Sibos in Boston this year, and Regulation NMS already having its impact in the US, all eyes could be forgiven for being focused on North America as we enter this “fall” season. But back in the Old Continent, it’s a sweeping pan-European regulation called MiFID that’s got everyone’s attention.

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… to the first issue of A-Team Insight Quarterly – or A-Team IQ as we prefer to call it. This new publication from A-Team Group is aimed at the buyers, users and makers of information technology solutions within the financial markets globally. Our aim is, on a quarterly basis, to bring you a valuable mix of strategic insight into how financial institutions and vendors are addressing the key challenges the industry is facing, and practical advice on how to tackle these issues within your own firm.

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A quick look into the activities of the FIX community, and the algorithmic trading products that refer to the specification, reveals some very interesting trends that will affect its future – and yours

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

The FIX protocol has generally been accepted as the de facto “standard” for electronic trading. Yes, there are other such protocols that can be used for a variety of specific instrument classes – many of them proprietary and some of them “open”. Yes, there are other messaging standards that complement, extend or even enable some of the same conversations that FIX conveys. And sure, FIX isn’t completely pervasive in the industry – yet. But no other effort within the financial services community has the momentum and general backing of such a large block of players. New participants are joining or existing members are increasing their FIX involvement, thus new FIX activities are commencing – and more importantly completing – with some frequency.

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There is no question that “bottom up” has gone “top down” when it comes to next generation reference data management. But is the support there?

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

As the industry addresses and resolves tactical data management issues with central data solutions, firms will leverage reference data into strategic business decisions – enterprise wide. Senior managers will look to data management solutions for top down, enterprise views of exposure and risk, as well as to provide scalability for future business needs.

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