A/S/L?

There were a number of factors that led up to the Perzo acquisition last week by a consortium of market participants, spearheaded by Goldman Sachs, which my colleague Max Bowie accurately describes as the worst-kept secret of the year in his own column.

A lot of this can be tied back to the simmering resentment felt by many over the behavior of Bloomberg reporters in accessing what should have been private terminal data to inform stories. Most people I speak to, at least, always cite this reason first ─ but Goldman was reportedly working on its own chat service for years before that broke. Perhaps it's less to do with anger at the murky divide between commercial and editorial at the information giant, then, more at its dominance in Wall Street.

There's no shortage of competitors lately, either. Thomson Reuters and Markit had a shotgun wedding between Eikon and the latter's federated chat service recently, while the new Perzo entity ─ Symphony - has already said that it will be able to integrate with Markit.

The key point touted by those involved in the programs is the security and encyrption features, which variously allow rooms to be encrypted at the local level, while participants have to use their real names, checked against a database for others. Hardly a sparkling new technology, for anyone who used IRC during the Nineties, but such is the way of so many things in this space. Granted, it will be far more layered and complex than I'm making out, but indirectly blaming the Bloomberg snooping scandal through thinly-veiled references to other people viewing chat content just doesn't sit right with me. That can't be the only reason.

Shoe-Leather Reporting
We've also had a raft of coverage from Swift's annual Sibos event in Boston, courtesy of my colleague Timothy Bourgaize Murray. Anyone who's been to Sibos in the past knows that there's barely enough time to eat, let alone take in the sights of the host city, so do Tim a favor and give his excellent reports a read-through. Covering Sibos is one of the toughest beats in fi-tech journalism, and doing it on your own, particularly, is a test of endurance. Someone buy that man a drink, and a new pair of shoes.

Tucked away at the end of the day on Wednesday was, perhaps, the most important story of the week ─ the submission of draft regulatory technical standards by Esma.

In terms of themes that have come out of the show, which is now likely the pre-eminent fi-tech event in the world, it's been interesting to see people talking about things like the blockchain and cyberwar. There are the usual gripes and mutterings about regulation, and on one particularly amusing anecdote, a promise that Target2-Securities would be in place by the next Sibos ─ but it does seem like the conference chatter was moving on from the usual topics a little this year. All eyes on Singapore next year, then.

IRS
Tucked away at the end of the day on Wednesday was, perhaps, the most important story of the week ─ the submission of draft regulatory technical standards by the European Securities and Markets Authority (Esma).

Now that I've lost most of you with that sentence, the RTS covered four distinct classes of interest-rate swaps that must be centrally cleared after the European Commission endorses Esma's work. Big story, big implications, and not long after they opened consultation for how non-deliverable forwards will work, too.