Solutions
Multiple and powerful pressures are impacting the hedge fund industry, but two are particularly prominent: a dramatically increased regulatory burden, and investor demands for greater transparency and lower fees.
Far-reaching and complex new rules continue to reshape the environment, from Dodd-Frank and EMIR to FATCA and AIFMD. To meet these stringent regulatory responsibilities, and keep pace with evolving investor best practices, hedge funds will need to adopt a firm-wide “culture of compliance.”
Non-compliance not an option
Satisfying regulatory rules and investor demands may seem like a costly headache, but compliance is simply good business. Poor or non-compliance risks:
More frequent
Hawksford is now able to provide a full range of trust services to both private and corporate clients in the Cayman Islands, having secured a Trust Licence from The Cayman Islands Monetary Authority.
Hawksford director Steve Robinson (pictured), who will help to build Hawksford’s name in the Cayman market, says the trust licence represents a milestone for the international corporate, private client and funds business. With this expansion into Cayman, Hawksford can now offer fiduciary services to clients from Europe, Asia and the Caribbean.
‘We are delighted that Hawksford now has operating capabilities in the Cayman Islands, this is
Incorporate the latest research advances and state-of-the-art practices in your investment business. Yale School of Management is teaming with the EDHEC-Risk Institute to deliver
Capital Support has released an new service, Cyber Secure, to meet the cybersecurity needs of alternative investment managers. Capital support says that Cyber Secure combines strong perimeter protection with live intelligent analysis to provide effective cybersecurity protection.
Cyber Secure has been designed with the finance sector in mind. The service is provided in two models: Protect and Detect, and SIEM (Security Information and Event Management). Protect and Detect provides advanced next generation firewall functionality, helping to protect firms from cyber-attack whilst introducing higher visibility and promoting the safe use of systems by users. SIEM extends the Protect and Detect service
Global Prime Partners has appointed Sean Capstick as Head of Prime Brokerage with immediate effect.
Capstick, who expects to double the size of the company’s broking business in three years, joins from RWC Partners, the USD11bn equity asset management business where he was both a member of the management committee and also Head of New Markets. Capstick had responsibility for all of RWC Partners client business outside of Europe.
Prior to this, Capstick was European Head of Prime Brokerage at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. He has also held senior positions at Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs.
Julian
For a fund jurisdiction that refers to itself as an ‘Innovation Nation’, the Bahamas continues to build its profile and popularity among global fund managers, and, it is hoped that the next stage of its evolution will be to attract more institutional money.
To underscore how innovation is having a tangible impact, the Bahamas is on track to exceed its previous high-water mark for fund registrations. With more than 800 funds, the island is back to pre-2008 levels and firmly on the rebound.
“2015 has been a good year, the number of fund registrations is growing faster than fund liquidations,”
Haitong International Securities Group has successfully gone live with GBST Holdings’ Syn~ capital markets platform to create a new institutional middle-office solution that the firm says is now a key component of its business expansion.
According to Haitong, due to rapidly growing trading volumes, its global institutional business needs an automated middle-office with low-latency matching and confirmations capability.


Andrew Sullivan, Managing Director of Sales Trading, Haitong International, says: “We are happy with the adoption of the internationally accredited system GBST Syn~, we are looking forward to receiving positive feedback from our clients.”

GBST says Syn~’s workflows cater for a wide range
Interactive Data, a provider of financial market data and analytics has added normalised swap data from the four principal Swap Data Repositories (SDRs) to its Consolidated Feed.
Dodd-Frank and EMIR rules require that certain trades of credit, interest rates, commodities and foreign exchange derivatives must be reported to an SDR within a certain timeframe post-execution, and that the data must be made publicly available. However, accessing and collating that data from the SDRs globally is a time and resource-intensive process in its own right, even before the more complex and costly challenge of analysing and categorising the data begins.
GTRA
Eurex is now offering its Trade Entry Services (TES) for customers based in the US.
Eurex’s TES enable trading participants to enter off-book transactions into the Eurex system, which allows them to benefit from the flexibility of customised trading and the advantages of standardised clearing and settlement through Eurex. Off-book trades can be processed for all Eurex Exchange products approved for trading in the U.S. by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).
The TES are available, among others, for FX futures, equity index futures, and fixed income futures and options.
FIX Trading Community is opening its technical standards process to software developers throughout the financial industry.
A standard, complete modern high performance interface for venues will promote fairness, lower costs, and should lead to quality and reliability improvements. An open process, based upon widely accepted open source licenses, that is hosted on the leading open source platform, GitHub, is seen as the optimal way to complete the design, implementation, and launch of the FIX Trading Community's high performance technical standards.
The objective is frictionless access: all of the important resources will be freely available in one place using a single
