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

Software as a service (SaaS) is more than ASP and more than SOA, we’re told, offering financial institutions access to the applications they want, when they want them, at a price that reflects their usage – in true service economy style. So what’s not to like?

They say there’s a silver lining to every cloud. This past year’s cloud has undoubtedly been the subprime crisis, the resulting credit crunch and the prospect of a severe economic slowdown in 2008. The prospect of continued layoffs within the financial services community appears real, even as the overwhelming message from the marketplace is that mission-critical technology projects will continue.

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By PJ Di Giammarino, CEO of JWG-IT Group Limited.

There is no room for scepticism in the post-MiFID world: the game has completely changed, and there is a set of new rules by which firms seeking continued success must abide.

In the aftermath the launch of the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID), the boundaries and differentiators of a new and better marketplace stand clearly visible and those on top of their game are already working out their winning strategies.

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By Thea George, Editorial Director, A-Team Group

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

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

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?

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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By Thea George, Editorial Director, A-Team Group

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?

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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By Roger Aitken, Contributing Editor, A-Team Group

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?

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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By Thea George, Editorial Director, A-Team Group

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

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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By Thea George, Editorial Director, A-Team Group

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?

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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By Richard Newbury, head of product management at Telekurs UK.

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?

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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By Sharon Wilbraham, Contributing Editor, A-Team Group

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

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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By Anthony Kirby, head of regulation and compliance at Accenture.

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.

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By Andrew Delaney

In an exclusive interview with A-Team IQ in April – just days before news of the Thomson-Reuters deal emerged – Reuters CEO Tom Glocer shared his views on his achievements at Reuters so far, and his plans for “Phase 3” – to make Reuters great again

Prologue
The CEO stepped out of the limousine and climbed the grey steps that led to the revolving doors into the run-of-the-mill glass and steel high-rise. Ushered through the lobby to the elevators, he rode to the allocated floor, where he was escorted along a sombre corridor to the teak double-doors of the board room.

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

A-Team has been tracking the diverse collection of technology innovators playing in the low latency space. So where is low latency IT going?

I was recently asked for a definition of low latency, and as I struggled to articulate a concise answer, I realised that it’s a term that means different things to different people. The best I could offer is that it means delivering data or conducting a transaction in as near to zero time as possible.

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By Thea George, Editorial Director, A-Team Group

Order routing system provider TORC Software has used technology from ACTIV to address its latency and throughput challenges

TORC Software operates TradeSpeed, an equity, options and futures order routing system connecting users to various exchanges and routing orders across multiple asset classes. Rob Newhouse, its chief technology officer, says when he came on board some three years ago, TORC’s technology platform was constrained in its ability to deliver quotes in a non-latent fashion.

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By Henry Young, Director at TS-Associates plc

If you are serious about low latency, it is worth trying to look beyond the hype

An introduction to the industry’s latest bandwagon is barely necessary. As an eternal cynic, I loathe seeing technology inappropriately sold. So among all the verbiage promoting low latency concepts and solutions, I feel the need to contribute some balance to the debate, and make some observations – a reality check.

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By David Litner, Senior Vice President, Engineering at NYSE Transacttools

What should exchanges be doing to facilitate the low latency demands of the marketplace?

The war to achieve low latency trading is one waged on many fronts. Losing any of the battles means defeat. The critical fronts are well known – the networks, the market data feeds, the trading applications and exchange adapters. In the past, the exchange could be thought of as the battlefield, the common element among combatants. Now that an exchange in essence means, an exchange, or an alternative trading system, or a multilateral trading facility, or a dark pool, the exchange industry battlefield is a new variable.

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