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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By Thea George, Editorial Director, A-Team Group

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

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

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

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?

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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By Christopher Morris

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

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

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

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

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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