Waters/Feature
SocGen's New Lease: CTO Bob Schmeider Prepares a Built-to-Spec New York Trading Floor
In July, Société Générale is heading east to its new home at 245 Park Avenue. With the massive infrastructural consequences in store, Americas CTO Bob Schmeider has found a project—la nouvelle maison Americaine—that is ideally fit. By Tim Bourgaize…
Private Equity's Data Play
In private equity, general partners (GPs)—which invest directly in portfolio companies—are becoming more sophisticated about monitoring those companies’ performance, while limited partners, which invest in the GPs’ funds, are in turn scrutinizing the…
Mobility Webcast: Anytime, Anywhere
In a recent Waters webcast on mobility, a number of key themes were addressed, including treading the fine line between regulatory obligations and personal privacy, managing multiple devices and a burgeoning IT infrastructure, and using mobile strategies…
The Lost Generation of Corporate Bond Platforms
Corporate bonds today remain among the most manual instruments to trade. But it did not have to be this way. Starting as far back as the late 1990s, attempts have been made to automate institutional credit trading. In part one of this two-part feature,…
60 Seconds with ...
Brian Sentance, CEO, Xenomorph
Pine River's Rapid Current: CTO David Kelly
Expanding on famously effective relative-value strategies in fixed income and mortgage arbitrage, and operating with a fully global footprint, Minnesota’s Pine River Capital had an eye for a technologist who knows buy-side products, prime brokerage, and…
Client Reporting: The Road to Empowerment
Quarterly investment reports have long provided the sandwich filling between investment managers and their clients. Vendors have helped to automate the process, but Steve Dew-Jones considers how technology can take this process to the next level.
Down Mexico Way: Will State-of-the-Art Tech Lure Liquidity?
Sensing an opportunity as the local economic picture continues to shine, the Mexican stock exchange last year installed a matching engine with significantly better latency and throughput. The technology is unquestionably in place, but will liquidity…
Regulation Webcast: Risk and Reward
Questions of extraterritoriality, market surveillance and the role of technology when it comes to dealing with new regulation, took precedence during a recent Waters webcast on the topic, along with elements of risk introduced by the sheer number of new…
What Lies Beneath: An Examination of Risk on the Buy Side (Part 2)
In part two of his examination of risk on the buy side, Anthony Malakian looks at how the regulatory environment is changing the way risk is managed and reported on, and delves into the buy versus build trade-off for risk-related technology.
Exchanges, Brokers Face HFT Surveillance Challenge
Although the benefits and drawbacks of high-frequency and algorithmic trading have been debated endlessly, the ability to perform competent and reliable surveillance on these operations is an area often relegated to the back rooms of conferences. James…
Metrics Man: BNY Mellon CIO Suresh Kumar
Suresh Kumar moved to the US at 24 to find a job in technology. Along the way to becoming CIO at BNY Mellon, he directed the first online brokerage, built a laudable technology stack at Pershing, and installed a software company back home in southern…
High Stakes: An Examination of Risk Management on the Buy Side (Part 1)
In part one of his two-part feature, Anthony Malakian examines the state of risk management at the portfolio/trade-book level among buy-side firms. Part two will look at the middle- and back-office functions of risk across the buy side.
Players on Loan: Data Governance, Settlement Automation Nearer as CLOs Reemerge
Leveraged loans are touted as an alternative to uneven bond yields, while collateralized loan obligations are scratching at pre-crisis levels. Yet despite years of collective pushes toward straight-through processing, loan products remain the “last…
Regulators Take Aim at Market Malfeasance with Industry-Supplied Surveillance System
The SEC has shown global regulators the way with its adoption of Tradeworx’s Midas market data feed and plans for software testing and a consolidated audit trail. But is it too little, too late? By Steve Dew-Jones
Front-Office Data Focus Spurs IBOR Push
Data management and aggregation are perennial challenges for all market participants. But for buy-side firms, elements of these disciplines have crystallized into an Investment Book of Record—an overview combining position-level data, cash flows,…
Lord's Tech as Savior: Michael Radziemski's Tech Vision Helps Lord Abbett Weather Hurricane Sandy
Michael Radziemski has spent the last decade helping to make Lord Abbett & Co.’s IT more mobile and scalable in order to drive the asset manager’s aggressive growth strategy. That strategy proved particularly valuable after Hurricane Sandy battered the…
Outsourcing: In Search of Secret Sauce
Sell-side institutions continue to find value in outsourcing services, especially within the back office, but there is much room for improvement. By Steve Dew-Jones
New 'Agora' Enables Shift in Quants' Roles
Flush with financial engineering knowledge as never before, firms are deploying quants to tackle new challenges. Tim Bourgaize Murray reports on a fresh discourse among them about technology—including communication, memory, and intuition—indicating a new…
Optimize: The How and Who
Collateral optimization is a reality for a few institutions, an attainable goal for a few others, and a pipe dream for the rest. In the second part of his feature on optimization, Jake Thomases checks in on who is optimizing and who isn’t, and on what an…
Pulp Fiction: The Case for Dematerialization
Starting around the mid-1980s, securities depositories and the financial services industry as a whole began to move toward a process of converting paper stock certificates to electronic formats. Reasons of market efficiency and risk reduction are cited…
No Easy FIX: Brokers Eye Outsourcing FIX Connections
FIX costs have long been a thorn in the side of more than a few brokers. While many still insist on managing their FIX connectivity internally, others have chosen to outsource this service to third-party providers. The question remains: Is the benefit…
Head in the Clouds: Impax COO Darren Johnson
After cutting his teeth at a variety of high-stress jobs in the City of London, Darren Johnson finally struck a balance between hard work and tranquility. Now as COO of Impax Asset Management, he sees the future in the cloud. By Steve Dew-Jones with…
The UX Factor: Visual Design Meets Finance
Financial applications once eschewed Marshall McLuhan’s famous argument—that the “medium is the massage”—by prioritizing function and cost over the beauty of the interface. No longer, experts say. Tim Bourgaize Murray reports on a design revolution that…