Wall Street & Technology: Blog

« July 2007 | Main | September 2007 »

Vendors largely have replaced in-house development as the source for mission-critical tools, according to Nicholas-Applegate Capital Management SVP and CTO Steve Rapp. For example, the firm has partnered with Latent Zero to overhaul its trading systems. Learn more about Nicholas-Applegate’s technology transformation through Wall Street and Technology’s exclusive interview with Steve Rapp.

Yesterday, Microsoft announced its intent to buy Parlano, maker of the MindAlign group chat software that eases collaboration among far-flung team members and provides support for the specific needs of Wall Street firms, including Chinese walls and security features. MindAlign is used by Wall Street firms such as ABN Amro, Cantor Fitzgerald, Deutsche Bank, Nomura, Putnam Investments and UBS.

Last night we dropped by a California wine tasting sponsored by State Street and NetManage at the Gartner Financial Services Technology Summit at the Times Square Marriott Marquis. At the reception, Jim Dobbie, vice president of State Street, told us a bit about how his firm has webified the applications it provides its mutual fund administration clients.

The SEC's Office of Market Surveillance, which enforces regulation on U.S. markets, appointed a new head in Mark Lineberry. He steps in for Joe Cella, who resigned earliers this year, according to reports.

Lineberry comes into the position during a flurry of activity surrounding insider trading. The SEC has of late stepped up its efforts to detect market timing abuses and shine the spotlight on criminal misuse of insider information.

With the number of cyber attacks continuing to rise, top security watchdog Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FS-ISAC) has announced a partnership with MessageOne to provide urgent fully automated security alerts to its 4,000-member firms.

Job hunters posting resumes online – and recruiters perusing them - are at risk. Symantec says a Trojan targeting popular job site Monster.com has recently stolen more than 1.6 million records.

U.S. capital markets would stand to gain from government legal and regulatory changes, according to a new NYSE survey of 240 chief executive officers of the world’'s top businesses.

It was reported in the Wall Street Journal today that discount brokerages TD Ameritrade and E-trade have been in merger discussions for the past few weeks. A merger between these two would create a powerful force for Charles Schwab and for full-service brokerage firms to reckon with, despite the fact that the era of discount brokerage is ending. How can that be? According to Adam Honoré, senior analyst at the Aite Group, some discount brokerages, including E-trade and Schwab, have made a quietly successful shift away from traditional discount brokerage and toward a new style of full service, one that’s scaled down and operationally efficient and that relies more heavily on technology and the online channel than on human financial advisors. In so doing, these firms continue to win the wallets of the coveted “mass affluent” consumer group, a segment just a bit younger than high-net-worth retirees.

Today four mutual funds — the Allegiant Advantage Fund, American Funds' Europacific Growth Fund, the Muhlenkamp Fund and the Vanguard 500 Index Fund — submitted their first XBRL-formatted risk/return summaries to the SEC. This means they’ve converted these summaries of fund objectives, costs, and performance — the part of prospectuses investors are most interested in — from static data to interactive data that can be automatically read by software, by tagging data fields according to a taxonomy developed by the ICI. The summary data will be made available in the SEC’s EDGAR online database (at the SEC's website), which began accepting such XBRL data from mutual funds yesterday.

A growing number of companies are blocking their employees from using the popular social networking Web site Facebook on fears of proscrastination and security. But there are some things you can do - at least to make it safer.

According to a survey of 600 global companies carried out by security firm Sophos, 50 percent of companies ban their employees from accessing Facebook.

Most are concerned that employees are wasting company time. But many are also afraid their employees are sharing too much information on the site, which could in turn lead to targeted phishing attacks against their employer.

We recently completed a review of the call centers at leading brokerage firms for our Broker Monitor report and, overall, things have improved in the past three years since the last time we looked at this issue.

This week has seen a flurry of activity in the development of electronic platforms for trading equity offerings by private companies that fall under a href=" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_144A" target="_blank">Rule 144A of the U.S. Securities Act. The rule allows for the private resale of securities between institutional investors, which gives private companies a means for raising capital without listing publicly.

Nasdaq announced the availability of an extension to its Web-based PORTAL platform that allows for displaying and accessing liquidity in 144A issuances. Additionally, heavy-hitters Citi, Lehman Brothers, Merril Lynch, Morgan Stanley and The Bank of New York Mellon revealed their plans to create OPUS-5, a competing platform for 144A listings. And to round out the competition, Bear Stearns got in on the act this week, launching its 144A platform, Best Markets, in the U.S.

Welcome. My name is Mike Ellison and I am the EVP at Corporate Insight. We’re a firm that looks at the retail experience at a number of brokerage, mutual fund, and banking firms. From time to time, I’m going to be blogging on subjects related to wealth management. Much of what I will be talking about will come from our experiences in maintaining live accounts at the firms we follow in our research. When we uncover something I feel would generate some lively discussion, I’ll post it and hopefully you’ll chime in with your opinions.

To open our discussion, we recently received an email from E*TRADE on identifying and avoiding fraud that I think should generate some dialog.

Merrill Lynch has become the latest financial institution to hit the headlines because of a security lapse.

Last week, the brokerage announced it would offer free credit monitoring to an unspecified number of employees after a laptop containing staffing records and personal financial details was stolen from its corporate offices in New Jersey.

Goldman Sachs Group agreed to purchase a minority equity stake in DirectEdge ECN, its parent Knight Capital Group announced today. Goldman will join Citadel Derivatives Group LLC, an affiliate of Citadel Investment Group, LLC, which purchased a minority equity interest in DirectEdge ECN in a transaction that closed on July 23, 2007.

To enable new decision-making opportunities, Eaton Vance is moving toward service-oriented architecture and real-time delivery of services, according to VP and CIO John L. Shea.

Financial institutions looking to protect themselves against identity theft and security lapses should be looking to voice biometrics, says Tel Aviv, Israel-based CellMax Systems.

Voice biometrics - the technology that authenticates the identity of a person based on their voice – is a good solution for any company doing business over a communications network that needs a person to be positively identified on the other end, Ziv Barzilay, founder and CTO of voice biometrics company CellMax, says.

John Galante, SVP and CTO for JPMorgan Worldwide Securities Services, says that as clients grow portfolios with derivatives and other alternative investments, JPMorgan is ready to meet their needs. Also, Galante says in this podcast he believes that having a steady flow of new recruits is vital for the company, as offerings and client needs expand.

Listen to this episode

Jim Mazarakis, CTO at T Rowe Price, is confident that Web 2.0 will be an important way to engage with clients in the near future. Mazarakis also shares his top three projects, his views for the future of financial technology and other insights during this special Wall Street & Technology 2007 Gold Book podcast.

Listen to this episode

Here's quick bit of appointment news from last week. Former JP Morgan Chase CIO, John Schmidlin has joined the board of directors for NYSE Regulation, the regulator announced.

Schmidlin spent 35 years at JPMC, working his way up from management trainee to stepping down from the CIO position in 2004. Prior positions at JPMC included head of enterprise technology services, and head of global technology and operations. He was among the architects of JP Morgan's $5 billion outsourcing relationship with IBM that took shape in 2003.

For the second time this week, a study has come out saying that Reg NMS and MiFID are going to trigger a dramatic increase in market data and in technologies for dealing with that data (read about the first report here). A Datamonitor study released today, “The Growing Significance of Market Data within Financial Markets,” predicts that U.S. and European hedge fund and fund management firms will spend $484 million and investment banks $1.9 billion on front office market data infrastructure by 2009.

When Peter Harrison, chief executive officer of IT outsourcing firm GlobalLogic, read a story we ran last week hypothesizing that India labor costs no longer justify outsourcing to that country (The End of Labor Arbitrage), he disagreed. Always happy to hear a contrarian view, we spoke to him today about what he’s observed while running a large operation in India. Among his points: India’s labor costs will continue to be lower than the U.S.’s for a long time, wage increases in India are primarily for senior-level jobs, and to succeed in India, you need a strong brand and great collaboration tools.

The introduction of Reg NMS and MiFID could cause a 900% surge in the amount of market data being published by 2012, according to a new study from TowerGroup .

So, what will this market data explosion mean for technology at trading venues?

Lime Brokerage, a direct-access agency broker located in the Tribeca section of New York City, recently began offering a service bureau model providing low-latency market data to other brokers dealers, according to George Hessler, EVP at Lime who heads sales and strategy. As one of the leading low-latency agency brokers, it does a lot of work with high frequency hedge funds. In fact, Lime’s founder and director, Mark Gorton and its CEO and co-founder Alistair Brown, co-founded hedge fund manager Tower Research Capital, specializing in quantitative trading and investment strategies.

May 2008 Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat         1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 Weblogs of Interest Dark Reading: Firewalled Chief Risk Officer: New Era of Risk Management InformationWeek's Blog Digest Parry Aftab, the Privacy Lawyer

Categories Asset Management Wealth Management Authors Cory Levine Greg MacSweeney Ivy Schmerken Melanie Rodier Penny Crosman Compliance Data Latency News Analysis OTC Derivatives Operations Security Podcasts Risk Management SIFMA TMC Trading Archives May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 February 2006 January 2006