Solutions
Euronext has extended its agreement with LCH SA on the continued provision of derivatives and commodities clearing services for a period of 10 years. This follows the announcement of 8 August 2017.
The new long-term agreement covers the clearing of financial and commodity derivatives for a period of 10 years. It provides continuity of clearing services for members, saving the cost and disruption associated with a migration at a time where client bandwidth is stretched due to MiFID II implementation and Brexit planning. Euronext and LCH SA will work together to develop new products for the benefit of clearing members
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has issued an amended order to Chicago Mercantile Exchange concerning foreign futures contracts currently listed or which will be listed in the future for trading on the Dubai Mercantile Exchange (DME) and cleared by CME.
The order was issued in response to a petition CME filed.
Under the order, CME and its clearing members that are registered futures commission merchants may commingle customer funds related to DME contracts with customer funds related to futures contracts in accounts segregated in accordance with Section 4d of the Commodity Exchange Act. The amended order expands a
QuantHouse’s QuantFEED and QuantLINK are now available via Virtu Financial’s disclosed Systematic Internaliser (SI) platform enabling clients to access Virtu’s liquidity under MiFID II’s transparent SI regime.
Virtu Financial is one of the largest electronic market makers, providing liquidity to the global equity, ETF, Energy, and FX markets and is raising the bar on transparency by providing bilateral liquidity in European cash equities to sell side firms in Europe by utilising MiFID II’s SI regime. Virtu Financial Ireland Limited intends to register as a Systematic Internaliser (SI) in Europe in 2018.
For many years QuantHouse has been successful in
NetCurrency.com, a fintech startup company based in Hong Kong, has released a beta version of Neco, a digital currency for global forex trading and asset management, a USD5 trillion daily market.
Net Currency (Neco, or NTC) is a geo-political neutral digital currency portfolio monetary system, and fundamentally different from crypto-currency or virtual currency such as Bitcoin. Net Currency is not issued by any central bank nor generated by computer algorithms, instead it is issued and funded by a community of users and consists of a portfolio of underlying world sovereign currencies, with percentages of each currency agreed upon by its members.
Metamako, a leader in specialist FPGA-enabled high-performance networking platforms, has teamed with Velocimetrics, a provider of intelligent, business flow tracking and performance analytics, to provide MiFID-compliant timestamping.
Metamako’s low-latency, FPGA-enabled network devices will deliver lossless data capture and nanosecond-precision timestamping; Velocimetrics’ VMX monitoring software will consume and analyse the ‘raw’ data to enable financial institutions to measure, monitor and gain deep insight into their business/trade flows with unprecedented speed, accuracy and flexibility.
Velocimetrics already provides applications for end-to-end visibility of trading data through its VMX EndtoEnd offering, and now the collaboration enables capital market firms to deploy a solution that
CME Group is planning to launch bitcoin futures in Q4 2017, pending regulatory approval. The new contract will be cash-settled, based on the CME CF Bitcoin Reference Rate (BRR) which serves as a once-a-day reference rate of the U.S. dollar price of bitcoin.
Bitcoin futures will be listed on and subject to the rules of CME.
“Given increasing client interest in the evolving cryptocurrency markets, we have decided to introduce a bitcoin futures contract,” says Terry Duffy (pictured), CME Group Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. “As the world’s largest regulated FX marketplace, CME Group is the natural home for this
By Jay Peller (pictured), Citco Fund Services – In recent years, established alternative fund managers have increasingly migrated business to fund administrators with a broad geographic footprint and extensive product expertise. The cost pressures faced by most managers in a low return environment have also been translated into continuing demands to improve efficiency.
The good news is that allocations to alternatives are growing globally with private equity seeing the most robust gains. The combination of rising assets, globalisation and increasing complexity has created a ripple effect for fund administrators. The need to deliver operational excellence to asset managers, while boosting
With offices in 35 locations worldwide, Apex Fund Services has grown into one of the financial industry’s largest independent fund administrators since it first opened its doors in Bermuda back in 2003.
And with plans to make upwards of 10 acquisitions within the next 24 months, Apex has its sights set on becoming a top five global fund administration group within the next five years.
This follows the recent announcement this summer that Genstar Capital, a leading middle-market private equity firm, has recapitalised Apex, whilst simultaneously acquiring Equinoxe Investment Services and merging it into the Apex Group.
“FTV Capital, a
One of the dangers of analysing consolidation trends in the fund administration space is that all firms are treated on a similar footing. However, rather than tarring them all with the same brush, the industry needs to separate the actions of investment bank-owned administrators from those owned by the large, traditional custodial banks and those operated by non-banking independent organisations.
“Custodial banks continue to invest in this space,” says Christine Waldron (pictured), global head of the Alternative Investment Solutions team at U.S. Bancorp Fund Services. “I do think investment banks, which have historically driven their revenues off of transaction-based services,
On 19 October 2017, Deutsche Bank announced that they had sold their Alternative Fund Services business to Apex Fund Services (`Apex’). It is the latest example of consolidation in the alternative fund industry as organisations decide whether to stick or twist in the fee-based – as opposed to transaction-based – world of asset servicing, where margins are less attractive that investing banking activities.
The transaction will add USD170 billion in AUA, propelling Apex to become the eighth largest administrator in the world and the largest independent administrator.
Peter Hughes, Founder and CEO of Apex, says that the aim is to
