Thinking about T+1 – Is a crisis always obvious? How do you define a crisis? It may sound like a dumb question – surely, it’s obvious! If your house is on fire – certainly. But is it always obvious? The reason I raise this issue is the efficiency of post-trade operations in buyside firms. For […]

  Following the debut of the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), which proposes that the Regulator should regulate infrastructure and is due to be ratified by the EU this year. The ISITC Europe debate on the subject of ‘Should the Regulator interfere in infrastructure, took place last week hosted by Metro Bank. The audience was […]

  As you may have seen, in the US the SEC has recently voted to propose rule changes including moving to a T+1 settlement cycle for most broker-dealer transactions in securities. The SEC says: “The proposed changes are designed to reduce the credit, market, and liquidity risks in securities transactions faced by market participants and […]

The diversification of institutional investments into a broader range of asset types over the last couple of decades has been significant and transformative. Buy-side firms have expanded their investment focuses from the more traditional end of the investment spectrum to all kinds of alternatives, including real assets such as commodities, real estate and even crypto […]

Accelerated digital transformation is driving increasingly complex and distributed digital infrastructures; across on-premises, private cloud and public cloud platforms. The reality is that most organisations find themselves in this ‘hybrid reality’ – and will continue to do so for some time to come. Organisations are investing significant amounts of money into building modern dynamic hybrid […]

Downtime is expensive. The average cost of unplanned application downtime at Tier One financial institutions exceeds $2.5bn every year, according to the IDC. The Operational Resilience of your business depends now more than ever on the availability of your IT systems. Critical systems and the applications which support them need to be available at all times, […]

At a recent webcast on the topic of reference data, with a panel of leading data experts including representatives from HSBC and Euroclear, which I had the privilege of moderating. The many problems of data in the Capital Markets, including reference data were put on the table and a range of potential solutions was discussed. […]

We need to talk post-trade : The problem with the status quo Even before the spring 2020 volatility, the need to invest in post-trade infrastructure across the sell-side was becoming widely accepted. Investment in the back-office has lagged that of the front-office for decades. In some institutions, front-office systems capable of executing thousands of trades a […]

Our recent joint ISITC Europe/CISI webcast tackled the age-old, thorny problem of data quality in the financial markets. Reference data, the vitally important data that relates to efficient settlement of financial transactions was highlighted during the panel discussion. The panel debated legacy data supply chains and the difficulty of retaining data quality, as the data […]

“There’s an evolution taking place” in blockchain and with other industry technologies, according to a panellist at this years annual ISITC Europe meeting in London. Bob Santangelo, president of international sales at Broadridge Financial Solutions, said that to adapt to this evolution, “every financial institution is looking at a way to create lower cost”, explaining […]