Solutions
Cowen has dramatically changed its presence in Europe and is aggressively investing in all of its businesses while the likes of Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, and others continue to downsize their operations. In the Prime Brokerage and Outsourced Trading businesses, the firm is planning meaningful expansions for 2020 and beyond. In the former, this effort is aimed at filling the void being created by others, while in the latter the commitment is in response to a sharp increase in demand for such services.
Speaking to Hedgeweek, Jack Seibald, Managing Director, Global Co-Head of Prime Brokerage and Outsourced Trading at Cowen,
According to industry data provider Coalition, the world’s 12 largest investment banks produced USD18.3 billion in prime services revenue last year, up 8.3 per cent on 2017 but despite this the PB arena remains as gladiatorial as ever.
On 7 July, Deutsche Bank announced that it was selling its PB business to BNP Paribas. This has led to a period of uncertainty, during which other bank-owned primes have sought to capitalise; most notably Barclays, which has reportedly attracted USD20 billion of hedge fund assets over to its balance sheet.
As hedge funds continue to deal with their own margin constraints, they
DGLD, a gold token with more than USD20 million in investment grade gold allocated in Swiss vaults and secured using Bitcoin, is now available for purchase exclusively on The PIT, Blockchain.com’s cryptocurrency exchange.
DGLD is a digital asset (token) created by CoinShares, Europe’s Largest Digital Asset Manager, Blockchain.com, the most trusted platform for cryptocurrency products, and MKS (Switzerland) SA, part of the world’s most trusted gold group. At creation, each DGLD token represents 1/10th of a troy ounce of physical gold stored in Swiss vaults for which token holders can swap or physically redeem.
The launch comes at a
RJ O’Brien & Associates (RJO), an independent futures brokerage and clearing firm in the United States, has successfully implemented Itiviti’s Managed FIX Service.
As an existing client of Itiviti in London, RJ O’Brien looked to consolidate separate regional hubs and required an efficient, functional and scalable “welcome” layer for its growing global business and a standardised solution enabling fast and unified onboarding of clients that would provide connectivity to a wide variety of downstream systems.
Itiviti’s Managed FIX service – based on the industry standard FIX protocol – provides RJO with a centralised hub for global client connectivity, allowing
The Swiss Blockchain Federation has published guidelines for issuers of digital equity and related tokens aimed particularly at helping smaller and mid-sized companies to fully leverage the issuance and trading of equity on the blockchain.
The issuance of equity and other financial instruments in the form of digital tokens is seen as one of the most promising use cases for the blockchain technology. Even smaller issuers are now able to digitise their equity, participation certificates or bonds in full compliance with regulatory requirements. They become digitally transferrable within seconds, which in the medium run could enable the development of a
As part of a wide ranging 2020 industry trend outlook, a survey of US asset managers and asset owners conducted by State Street Corporation predicts continued prevalence of digital assets as well as a bigger role in the industry for semi-transparent active ETFs.
Given the more supportive regulatory stance the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has recently taken toward semi-transparent active ETFs, many respondents now see a much bigger role for these vehicles in the market. Nearly half (47 per cent) say semi-transparent ETFs will play a significant role in their firm’s future portfolio strategy. Similarly, 46 per cent of
Napoleon AM has launched the Napoleon Bitcoin Fund, a Specialized Professional Fund under the French law, with daily liquidity, and one of the first regulated vehicles in the world offering exposure to the performance of Bitcoin, the main digital asset.
The fund aims to replicate the performance of Bitcoin via Futures listed on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in cash settlement, thereby avoiding the problem of storing and valuing Bitcoin. It offers daily liquidity to investors and uses the services of Financière d’Uzès as Custodian and PwC as Auditor to meet client standards.
As the first digital asset, Napoleon AM says
SteelEye, a compliance technology and data analytics firm, has taken the next step in its international expansion plan with the opening of a new office in Paris.
Since its inception in 2017, SteelEye has acquired over 40 clients across seven countries. This new office supports SteelEye’s rapid growth and positions the company closer to the regulated financial markets in France. The Paris location also brings SteelEye closer to the Benelux region, Switzerland and many of its existing clients.
SteelEye was developed to help reduce the cost and complexity of conforming to international regulation and has helped its global clientele successfully
Crypto Asset Rating (CAR), the Independent Structured Rating Agency, has expanded its global team with the appointment of Jacob Prudhomme as Chief Legal Officer.
In this capacity, Prudhomme will oversee the company’s legal and regulatory affairs and will design a compliance program focused on safeguarding the independence and integrity of the CAR analytic process. Prudhomme was formerly Head of North American Compliance at S&P Global Ratings and a former Senior Counsel at the Securities and Exchange Commission, where he specialised in equities market structure and credit rating agency regulation. Most recently, he has been with Corcoran Regulatory Advisors, LLC providing regulatory advisory services to
Exchange Data International’s (EDI) Worldwide Corporate Actions (WCA) data and Security Reference Data (SRF) services are now available for purchase in AWS Data Exchange.
AWS Data Exchange is a new service that allows Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers to securely find, subscribe to, and use third-party data in the cloud. This allows potential retail customers access to EDI’s high quality reference data and corporate actions data via the cloud to help identify events that may impact their investment strategy for global equities.
“We are pleased to be part of the launch of AWS Data Exchange,” says Jonathan Bloch (pictured),
