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Global investors are moving toward a ”risk-off” stance, taking on greater protection as the prospect of geopolitical instability grows, according to the BofA Merrill Lynch (BoAML) Fund Manager Survey for March.
Responding at a point of growing tension in Ukraine, 81 per cent of investors said they see geopolitical risk posing a threat to financial markets stability – more than four times the reading one month ago.
Twenty-seven per cent of investors say that a geopolitical crisis is the biggest tail risk – up from 12 per cent in February.
At the same time, investors continue to express
Maples Fund Services has extended its regulatory reporting service to incorporate Annex IV reporting for AIFMD.
The new offering will provide an interactive solution for clients to streamline their regulatory reporting workflow from the capture of data and key assumptions through risk computations, review, approval, and straight-through reporting to the relevant authorities.
The new services will complement existing compliance and regulatory services including reporting for Form PF, CPO-PQR, and OPERA already provided to fund administration and middle office clients.
These services leverage proprietary solutions for accounting, performance and risk reporting performance reporting provided to middle and back office
One of the clearest differences between trading equities and fixed income securities is the extent to which analytics play a role in risk management.
Equities go up, they go down. Fixed income securities, however, are subject to numerous parameters such as credit risk, yield-to-maturity, default risk and duration risk to name but a few. Most investors understand equities, yet the vast majority would no doubt struggle to explain the mechanics of fixed income.
This is despite the fact that fixed income strategies – spanning government bonds, sovereign bonds, high-yield corporate bonds, mortgage-backed securities, non-bank loans and emerging market bonds –
Global institutional trading network Liquidnet is planning to enter the fixed income market with its acquisition of bond trading platform Vega-Chi.
The partnership, subject to regulatory approval, will combine Liquidnet’s experience, scale and global reach within the institutional investment community with Vega-Chi’s corporate bond trading platform and sector expertise to accelerate efficiencies within the corporate bond market.
“There has been a massive increase in corporate bond issuance and at the same time a depletion of capital that dealers can use to facilitate trading. The result has been increasing difficulty among investment managers and dealers in accessing liquidity. To fix
KNEIP has been appointed by Vontobel Asset Management to carry out fund data management, regulatory filing, KIID production and dissemination and financial reporting.
Vontobel Asset Management will be making use of KNEIP’s service across its entire Swiss- and Luxembourg-domiciled fund ranges.
Joel Kieffer, sales manager at KNEIP, says: “Our data, document and reporting management solution helps Vontobel streamline the data aggregation process and supports the generation and submission of the finalised documents to relevant authorities, in the relevant languages and formats.”
For regulatory filing, KNEIP’s solution was developed in partnership with CETRELSecurities and is fully sanctioned by Luxembourg
Oslo Børs has upgraded Oslo Connect, its OTC derivatives MTF trading and price discovery system, to the latest version of Edge, which is provided by Baymarkets.
Edge is the trading and registration platform used by exchanges, brokerage firms and banks in multiple markets throughout the world.
Oslo Connect combines the flexibility of the OTC market with the reliability of the standardised exchange market to ensure efficiency in trade processing for tailor-made derivatives. Users of Oslo Connect can negotiate and trade derivatives, utilising straight through processing (STP) into Oslo Clearing or bilateral deal capture and settlement.
The upgraded Oslo
Euronext has signed agreements with four exchanges in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region for the implementation of its new UTP solution, UTP-Hybrid.
The four exchanges are the Amman Stock Exchange, the Beirut Stock Exchange, Bourse des valeurs Mobilieres de Tunis and the Muscat Securities Market.
The project will include the replacement of the NSC trading platform, support for which will be discontinued from a commercial perspective in 2015.
The MENA region has a sophisticated financial markets industry with exchanges looking for a cost-effective, high performance platform to support growth in equities or entry into new
Solactive AG has launched the Solactive European Buyback Index (BUYEU), which will be used to underlie index-linked products by Société Générale Corporate & Investment Banking (SG CIB).
This includes swaps, options, warrants and certificates.
Buyback is defined as the purchase of its outstanding shares by a company. It is well-known as an alternative way for companies to ‘return’ cash to their shareholders by increasing earnings per share, used first in the US and more and more in Europe as well.
By repurchasing some shares, companies officials, regarded as having superior information, state that they consider the current shares
USD4.1trn of European financial and non-financial corporate debt rated by Standard & Poor's Ratings Services is expected to mature between 2014 and 2018.
Of this USD4.1trn, USD866m is scheduled to mature in 2014 and, given normal data reporting lags, the credit market may have already accommodated a portion of this amount.
After 2014, the annual scheduled maturities are USD909bn in 2015, USD863bn in 2016, USD754bn in 2017, and USD678bn in 2018.
Financial companies account for 60 per cent (USD2.4trn) of Europe's maturing debt, and 86 per cent (USD3.5trn) of the debt is rated investment grade ('BBB-' and higher),
Confluence, a provider of automated data management solutions for the investment management industry, has appointed Hugh Byrne as managing director of sales.
Based in London, Byrne will be responsible for setting Confluence's strategic sales direction in Europe and continuing to drive growth throughout the region.
“Hugh brings a wealth of valuable experience positioning high-value complex solutions to deliver business value to the asset management industry," says Todd Moyer, senior vice president of global sales, who leads Confluence’s international expansion efforts. "His extensive knowledge of investment management operations will be invaluable to our clients as they look to solve increasingly
