Looking Ahead to BST North America

While many of you, including myself, are looking forward to the Sibos conference in Toronto in a few weeks, I wanted to draw your attention to our buy-side-focused conference here in New York on Thursday October 5.

It’s a challenging time for buy-side firms, with the looming specter of the revised Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (Mifid II) coming into force in 95 days, and with new technologies providing opportunities and challenges across the spectrum of buy-side firms, from small family offices through to the largest asset managers. Meanwhile, cybersecurity continues to gain importance as perhaps the greatest threat that firms in the financial markets face today—even regulators.

Our agenda this year reflects that, starting with our traditional panel of C-level executives from Credit Suisse Asset Management, the Blackstone Group and Black Diamond Capital Management, following a keynote from Paul Algreen, CIO at Janus Henderson Investors.

That will be followed by discussions on the application of machine learning to investment management, and how to shore up defenses against cyber attacks. Speakers on these panels come from academia, and from the industry, with senior executives from TIAA-CREF, Morgan Stanley Global Wealth Management, BNY Mellon Investment Management, MacKay Shields, and UBS, among others.

We’ll also be looking at alternative data and how that can be harnessed for the front office, but it’s not all pure analytics—we’ll also have a panel on how technology is being impacted by the shift to passive investing and away from active management, with speakers from BlackRock, Deutsche Bank Asset Management and WorldQuant.

The afternoon’s workshops will cover the points from the morning session in a more intimate setting, and the panels for the afternoon will focus in on the challenges in complying with Mifid II from a buy-side perspective, data management, and of course, appropriate strategies for dealing with fintech. Our champagne roundtables at the end, ever-popular fixtures at our buy-side events, will offer focused discussions over a glass of bubbly on the major topics of the conference.

As always, Waters staff will be on the ground in force, and myself, US editor Anthony Malakian and US reporter Emilia David will be around all day. We’re very keen to hear what your challenges are, so please do not hesitate to come up and say hello. I know where they keep the good whisky.

As always, feel free to shoot me an email at james.rundle@incisivemedia.com or give me a call on +1-646-490-3974 if you want to chat or arrange a meet-up beforehand.

This Week on Buy-Side Technology:

• My colleague John Brazier takes a look at how research unbundling in Mifid II is progressing, as well as the impact on US firms.
• Nasdaq and SEB have partnered on a blockchain-powered trading platform for Swedish mutual funds.
• Anthony explores how the Wisconsin state pension fund overhauled its IT architecture.
• Meanwhile, on the podcast, we discuss T2S and how JPMorgan is approaching its fintech strategy, featuring an interview with the head of its in-residence program, Oliver Harris.