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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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 Angela Wilbraham, Chief Executive Officer, A-Team Group

All eyes will be on Paris in April for TradeTech Europe, a Mecca for the electronic trading community. Nothing signifies progress in the industry like the onward march of algorithmic trading. With some firms reporting as much as 40 per cent of European equity order flow now being handled by algorithms, this is a business on a path of significant growth.

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