Canada and the US are in lockstep to shorten their settlement cycle from three days to two days on September 5, 2017, but Canada is taking its preparations one step further when it comes to the critical post-trade function of matching trade details. The Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA), the umbrella organization representing all of Canada’s […]
Cybersecurity and AML: How the Twain Must Meet?
What is the connection between a bank’s cybersecurity breach or event and money laundering? The same criminal. says the US Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. That’s why FinCEN wants financial firms to include information on cybersecurity events or breaches on their suspicious activity reports (SARs). Doing so will ensure that the financial firm is on […]
Europe’s PRIIPs: When Being Clear Isn’t All That Easy
Fund managers, banks and insurance firms can now breathe a collective sigh of relief, but not for long. The European Commission has just announced that it has postponed by one year the implementation date for new legislation requiring financial firms to more clearly explain the risks and rewards of some investment products that fall under […]
Swing Pricing for US Funds: Has the SEC Gone Far Enough?
Like it or not, fund managers will have to make peace with the Securities and Exchange Commission’s new investment company reporting modernization program and liquidity management guidelines. They’re going to have to accept doing more to curb their liquidity risk and disclose more about their investment composition. Oddly, it’s a voluntary aspect of the new SEC […]
Equity Derivatives Withholding Tax Remains Taxing (Updated)
(Editor’s Note: On November 14, 2016 SIFMA asked the US Treasury to postpone the implementation date of IRS Section 871(m) from January 1, 2017 so that it can resolve a difference of opinion with G5 countries. The UK, Germany, Spain, France, and Italy have told the Treasury that dividend equivalent payments made outside the US […]
Seeking a Few Good Men (Women) for ISIN Governance Role
Do you work for a fund manager, bank, broker dealer or altenative trading platform and have extensive product knowledge of interest rate, foreign exchange, credit and commodity derivatives, understand reference data, data management, architecture and implementation of data standards? If the answer is yes to all or most of the criteria, you could end up […]
ANNA FIXes Tech Specs for OTC ISIN Allocation
If operations and IT managers of the biggest trading firms and trading platforms have been wondering exactly how they’ll get their hands on International Securities Identification Numbers (ISINs) for over-the-counter derivatives when they need them for transaction reporting under Europe’s Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID), they found part of the answer last week. […]
New York Proposed Cyber Rules: Too Much, Too Fast
Cutting down one risk — that of a cybersecuity breach — is promising to add a lot more risk of other kinds. Those would be increased costs and liability. The New York State Department of Financial Services has gone further than its federal peers by mandating hard and fast policies instead of risk-based methodology to […]
Accenture, Broadridge, Synechron on Blockchain
The financial world is spending countless hours — and millions of dollars — hypothesizing how blockchain — the new distributed way of storing information — could eliminate huge operational costs. Banks, broker-dealers, exchanges, and securities depositories have started exploring its potential vast use with the help of technology providers. Blockchain could theoretically be applied to […]
Uncleared Swap Deals: Clarity Is Work in Progress
“It’s not that complicated.” Regulators might have thought that setting specific rules for margining uncleared swap transactions would make life easier for financial firms because they will won’t have to negotiate over how, or even whether to collateralize their deals. They couldn’t have been more wrong. So said panelists and attendees at the International Swaps […]