Top 10 Features of 2014: A Year in Headlines, Part 1

As most readers of Waters will know, a regular issue generally contains four in-depth features ─ excluding the cover profile ─ where we take a close look at the issues that the industry is facing, and speak with market participants on the challenges and struggles they have to overcome in a near future.

That represents about 192 pages, and around 84,000 words that were dedicated to breaking down the financial technology hot topics of the past 12 months. The following will help you recap the best stories that shaped 2014. 

10. Slow Budget Growth Prompts New Spending Strategies

Setting the tone for 2015, Dan DeFrancesco talks about technology spend and how firms need to carefully plan ahead their budget now that spending money on IT has become a luxury. Overspending has left some firms’ IT departments bloated but it is still necessary, if not crucial, to keep the firm’s infrastructure up to date. With most of the budget now going to compliance, IT teams have to do more with less. Spending, yes, but differently. A ‘How To Spend It’ for CTOs, in short.

9. KYC: Know Your Choices

Once more, we touched on the topic of outsourcing and the risk that goes with having someone else taking care of your business, but this time looking at KYC. In this feature, Tim Bourgaize Murray explores new outsourced models of dealing with KYC requirements as financial services struggle with greater regulatory attention. These models could potentially help the sell side save precious operating capital, and the buy side avoid a massive, repeating headache, but the extent to which outsourcers can or should take on legal liability for the KYC process remains the big question.

8. The Rise and Rise of HTML5

Waters’ US editor, Anthony Malakian, takes a close look at the rise of the programming language HTML5. Although a lot of companies bet on its success a decade ago, the industry was not entirely ready. As Tony explains, one key sticking point of HTML5 adoption is the fact that older Internet Explorer browsers — still ubiquitous on Wall Street — are, at best, only two-thirds compliant with the programming language. But as firms increasingly enhance browser functionality and with the explosion of open-source tools, HTML5 might just become the go-to language for trading application development in the future.

7. Israel: Land of Start-Ups

Israel might not be seen as the safest place on earth to invest but taking a pure technology angle, it is currently one of the hottest places for high-tech companies to establish themselves. With one of the highest numbers of start-ups per capita in the world, it was only a matter of time before the capital markets became involved. Marina Daras travelled to Israel to see how banks were dealing with the trust issue that goes with working with start-up companies and how this had allowed them to adopt some of the latest technologies available on the market, at reduced prices.

6. China Opens Up Capital Markets with Hong Kong Connection

The 'Through Train' linking up Mainland China and Hong Kong has been an exciting story. James Rundle tells us how the SSE–HKEx Stock Connect program was built and what it means for the whole region to have this two-way traffic between the two marketplaces come to fruition. But if China is slowly allowing foreign investment into its capital markets, there are still concerns around settlement practices and other regulatory standards, and although most expect the program to eventually encompass Shenzhen, and potentially move to other asset classes in the future, investors are initially restrained to trade mid-cap and large-cap stocks only.

For the Top 5, check waterstechnology.com this Monday, December 22nd.