ITRS Group has announced the successful implementation of its real-time monitoring software, Geneos, across the National Stock Exchange of India's (NSE) global IT operations as part of a wider project to ensure it remains at the technological forefront of the region’s securities industry.

The implementation of ITRS Geneos forms a key part of the NSE's strategic objective to pioneer technological advances and streamline its complex operations, keeping it ahead of the huge recent regulatory reform in the Asian securities market. The NSE has recently set up facilities that serve as a model for the securities industry in terms of systems, practices and procedures.

The IT operations support team were keen to increase availability of business critical systems and improve visibility to the business of the service they provide. This required a move to a centralised tool to generate one source of trusted information, and real-time views across the entire IT estate. The team is using the same underlying data to generate pattern-based analytics and tailored views for the different user groups.

Mr G Shenoy, CTO-Operations, NSE says: "ITRS Geneos gives us an early warning system so that we can easily detect any failures or anomalies within our deep technological infrastructure. We’ve already seen this in action multiple times.”

"This was a great project for our Professional Services team to get involved in", says Guy Warren, CEO, ITRS. "While we have many clients using Geneos across various departments within their business to monitor their full IT stack, the NSE is our first client in Asia to truly deliver this across their whole business as one environment, encompassing six different user groups that comprise technical, business focused and managerial consumers of the data.”

ITRS has recently added staff and services to its Hong Kong and Singapore offices to better support its growing number of clients in the region. As the market evolves, ITRS will continue to work with the NSE on the Geneos implantation to meet its changing needs.

Digital Asset, a developer of distributed ledger technology for the financial services industry, today announced that it has made several key senior hires across its global offices. The company has appointed Carol Mathis as its Chief Financial Officer. Mathis joins from RBS Corporate and Institutional Bank where she was Chief Operating Officer and previously CFO. The company has also hired Josh Varsano as Chief Human Resources Officer, Gavin Wells as Head of Europe, Kelly Mathieson as Product Manager, Gordon Weir as Head of Delivery, Andrew Pisano as Business Development Director, Emnet Rios as Director of Finance and Operations and Martin Korbmacher as a Strategic Advisor to help scale Digital Asset’s accelerated growth.

These recent appointments reflect the continued development of Digital Asset’s senior team and follow several key hires over the past year, signaling the firm’s commitment to expanding its services to meet the needs of its clients. Mathis, Varsano, Mathieson, Pisano and Rios are based in New York, while Wells and Weir are based in London. Korbmacher will be based in Frankfurt.

“I am delighted to welcome such talented and experienced individuals to our team. We are privileged to tap into the expertise of these world-class leaders with deep expertise and proven track records in the specific areas that will be critical to accelerating our efforts to the benefit of our customers,” said Blythe Masters, CEO of Digital Asset.

Mathis brings extensive leadership experience in finance, treasury and operations. She joins Digital Asset from RBS’ Corporate and Institutional Bank where she spent nearly three years as COO and Managing Director. Prior to that, she was Chief Financial Officer and Managing Director of the firm for more than twelve years. Before joining RBS, Mathis was a Partner at at PricewaterhouseCoopers in its Capital Markets Assurance Division where she spent twelve years.

Varsano has built and led teams across consumer and financial services and was most recently the Global Head of Human Resources for Point72 Asset Management. Prior to this, he was at J.P.Morgan Chase for eight years as an HR Managing Director, Consumer and Community Banking and also led the firm’s Global Experienced and Executive Recruiting function. Varsano has also held senior HR positions at various firms including Cigna, UBS and IBM.

Wells is an industry executive who spent eight years at LCH.Clearnet, working with participants from across the market to deliver the first clearing service for Foreign Exchange, known as ForexClear. In that role, he was also part of the Executive Committee of the clearing house. Before that, Wells worked as a Managing Director at Citigroup for fifteen years in a variety of roles spanning FX trading, e-commerce, algorithmic trading and prime brokerage.

Mathieson also brings a wealth of financial services experience after spending twenty-six years at J.P.Morgan Chase and three years at Goldman Sachs. Most recently, Mathieson was Head of J.P.Morgan’s Global Collateral Management and Securities Clearing businesses. Mathieson was also instrumental in aiding the Federal Reserve Bank of New York with the tri-party repo reforms post-2008. Other roles at J.P.Morgan included Head of Global Custody Product and Head of Online Brokerage Product Asset Management.

Weir has a significant amount of experience in lean and agile thinking within capital markets and joins the company from Bank of America Merrill Lynch where he was the Head of Securities Operations Tech Americas, and most recently the Head of Development Transformation across Global Technology and Operations. Before this, Weir led the replacement of the global clearing and settlement systems for the equities business at UBS. Weir has also worked at PwC and IBM where he worked on large scale software delivery and numerous integration programs.

Pisano brings both distributed ledger and business development knowledge after joining Digital Asset from CME Group’s Digitization Group where he helped define the company’s blockchain strategy and commercialized proofs-of-concepts. Pisano has also held other roles at CME within Products and Services and has previously worked at Green Exchange and KPMG.

Rios joins from RBS after spending more than eleven years in a variety of roles including Director of Financial Planning and Analysis. She possesses a number of core competencies relating to financial modelling, strategic planning and management reporting. Prior to RBS, Rios spent five years at IBM serving in various positions spanning budgeting, forecasting and financial performance reporting.

Korbmacher is the Founder and Managing Director of Event Horizon Capital & Advisory GmbH, an independent advisory and investment banking boutique. Prior to that, he spent more than seven years at Credit Suisse as the Head of Investment Banking for Germany & Austria. Korbmacher has also held senior roles at Dresdner Kleinwort and J.P.Morgan, adding further financial services experience to Digital Asset.

Earlier this year, Digital Asset announced that it was opening a London office to support its clients and increase its presence in the UK and European markets. Justin Amos, a former Managing Director at NICE Actimize was appointed as Head of Europe but shortly thereafter relocated to Sydney to build out Digital Asset’s Australia office following the selection by ASX to design the world’s first national scale post-trade solution utilizing distributed ledger technology. Wells has since taken over as Head of Europe with Amos taking on the role of Head of APAC.

Kyc.com, the joint venture between IHS Markit and Genpact, today announced that Bank of Montreal has signed onto the service to streamline the collection and management of know your customer information (KYC).

Kyc.com standardises and centralises operations around client onboarding and due diligence. Firms benefit from an industry led policy standard for KYC data quality and completeness as well as lowered costs and simplified processes.

Kyc.com counts ten of the top G14 dealers as subscribers of the service. Over 2,000 buyside firms and corporations, representing 83,000 legal entities are now using kyc.com to simplify the provision of know your customer (KYC) and other documentation to their banks.

“Adding Bank of Montreal to our service, as well as recently announcing one of the largest buyside firms, PIMCO, is a testament to the strength of our offering,” said Michele Trogni, executive vice president, Consolidated Markets and Solutions for IHS Markit. “Since we launched in 2014, there have been a number of new entrants vying for market share. We are delighted to add Bank of Montreal and we attribute this win to the agility of our service that addresses multiple challenges across KYC, AML, tax, regulation and legal and credit agreements.”

“The growth and adoption of the kyc.com service over the past two years has been very encouraging and highlights the combined power of a solution that encompasses technology, analytics, and deep domain expertise that our joint venture provides in solving multiple regulatory challenges,” said Monty Singh, senior vice president and business leader, Capital Markets and IT Services, Genpact. “The addition of Bank of Montreal further validates the utility model for KYC and is a nod from the industry towards a disruptive yet economically efficient operating model.”

Kyc.com was originally founded in 2014 and designed in partnership with Citi, Deutsche Bank, HSBC and Morgan Stanley. Additional G14 institutions on the service include BNP Paribas and UBS with Standard Chartered in the process of signing up.

Blockchain, or distributed ledger, technology is expected to track a similar adoption curve as the internet, with a period of inspiration and experimentation being followed by a phase of ‘crossing the chasm’, and a final phase of growth and mass adoption leading to full maturity of the technology by 2035.

A recent report by Citisoft considers the impact of blockchain on the buy side – to date, most research and reporting has covered the sell side – sets out a potential adoption curve for the technology, and suggests how data management and reporting will change as blockchain is rolled out.

The report, Back to the Future: A Buy-Sider’s Guide to Blockchain authored by Citisoft directors Ben Keeler and Alissa Doherty, also likens the disruption and revolution caused by the advent and evolution of the internet to the impact blockchain technology could have on the asset management lifecycle. It states: “What the internet has done for the exchange of information, blockchain promises to do for the exchange of value.”

The Citisoft blockchain adoption curve is split into three phases. The initial inspiration and experimentation phase is expected to run from 2009 to 2019 and includes governments and regulators encouraging exploration of the technology, consortia investing in applications and best practice, and early applications focussing on the exchange of non-liquid security transactions and smart contract agreements.

While this phase is coming to an end, and will have little or no impact on data management and reporting, Citisoft notes that it raises questions around standards, security, scale, exception processing and buy-side aversion to the adoption of early stage technology.

Phase two adoption, ‘crossing the chasm’, is expected to span six years from 2019 to 2025. It is characterised by most complex OTC transactions using blockchain technology and making post-trade processing and credit intermediaries unnecessary, more mainstream transactions using blockchain and diminishing the need for reconciliation and settlement processes, and market and reference data providers being threatened by readily available data on distributed ledgers.

Looking at the impact of blockchain on asset managers during phase two of adoption, the report suggests that the use of blockchain in the front office for mainstream security transactions will reduce the need for custody, settlement, trade processing and reconciliation in the middle and back office. In terms of data management, asset managers my become less reliant on data services if market and reference data is available from distributed ledgers. They may also tap into blockchain protocols to keep records on an internal private chain to support regulatory requirements and reporting.

The third phase from 2025 to 2035 covers growth and mass adoption. It includes blockchain being used across asset classes, accelerated migration from legacy technology and processes, the rise of new service providers that will change the capital markets ecosystem, and by 2035, technology maturity.

Through this phase, and with mutual ownership of shared ledgers, Citisoft expects investment managers’ reliance on custodian services to diminish, multiple accounting and investment books of record to be replaced by a common, known set of settled transactions, and the burden of regulatory reporting to become a thing of the past.

The impact of this phase of adoption on asset managers will see the front office conducting all transactions via blockchain and benefitting from lower costs, better price discovery and reduced counterparty risk, data being available via internally and externally permissioned blockchains, and regulatory reporting woes becoming obsolete as regulators access transaction records directly.

Asset Control today announces the appointment of Mark Hepsworth as Chief Executive Officer (CEO) with immediate effect.

Mr. Hepsworth brings to Asset Control the experience of a career with leading providers of financial data, application software and services and a track record of successful product innovation and business development.

Prior to joining Asset Control, Mr. Hepsworth served at Interactive Data Corporation (IDC) as President, EMEA and was a member of the company’s executive leadership team. Previously with IDC in New York, he led the company’s core Pricing and Reference Data business from 2008. Beginning his career in financial services at ACT Financial Systems (now part of Misys), Mr. Hepsworth later joined Standard and Poor’s Comstock as Managing Director, EMEA, a role he held until the business was acquired by IDC in 2003.

Commenting on his appointment, Mr. Hepsworth says: “I am delighted to be joining Asset Control as CEO. Asset Control has been at the heart of financial data management for 25 years and has grown to serve an impressive community of clients drawn from the world’s leading financial institutions. I look forward to working with our customers and the talented team of industry experts at Asset Control. We will continue to focus on world-class service as we deliver data management solutions that are effective and efficient.”

Based at Asset Control’s City of London headquarters, Mr. Hepsworth’s appointment follows recent announcements by Asset Control of new products aimed at helping banks meet the new regulatory exposure reporting standards known as FRTB. Mr. Hepsworth will lead and develop Asset Control’s mission to help clients stand behind the integrity of all their financial data.

SimCorp, a leading provider of investment management solutions and services for the global financial services industry, today announced that it has released version 6.0 of its integrated investment management solution, SimCorp Dimension. The new release, which is the second of this year’s two releases, introduces a number of new modules and enhancements across front, middle and back office.

A new module, ‘General Reconciliation – Static Data’ adds to the recently launched Reconciliation Manager, which was introduced with Release 5.9 as a central hub for all reconciliation processes with full integration to the system’s IBOR (Investment Book of Record). The new module facilitates the reconciliation of static data, for example the maturity date of a bond or the expected dividend on an equity, against data reported by a third party.

Within the performance area, new functionality has been added to SimCorp’s Factor-based FIPA (fixed-income performance attribution) solution. The solution enables you to monitor the results of decisions made on different levels of an investment process and has now been strengthened with better instrument coverage, support for exposure-based performance for derivatives, and the ability to view contribution to FIPA effects, all with the aim of providing more analytical insight.

Other highlights in the release include:

• Front Office: Numerous enhancements within compliance, portfolio management and trading, including new functionality for FX hedging and simulation, and improved OTC simulation workflows.
• Private Debt: New module that adopts a completely new and flexible structure for efficient front-to-back handling of syndicated bank loans traded in the secondary market as well as bilateral or direct loans with advanced commitment-based agreements.
• Omgeo interface: SimCorp maintained interface to Omgeo’s OASYS US Domestic trade allocation and acceptance service that communicates trade and allocation details between investment managers and broker/dealers.
• IFRS 9 support: New functionality in the Investment Accounting Manager, which completes the set-up needed for full support of IFRS 9, phase 1 in SimCorp Dimension.

Marc Schröter, SVP and head of SimCorp Product Management, comments: “Operating in a complex world with tough competition, regulatory burdens, and increasing amounts of data, investment managers need up-to-date, integrated solutions to operate efficiently and gain a competitive edge. Release 6.0 of SimCorp Dimension shows our commitment to providing exactly this in one single dynamic system.”

The next version of SimCorp Dimension^® will be released in February 2017.

OneMarketData, a leader in tick data management and analytics, today announced that Aequitas NEO Exchange (“NEO Exchange”) has implemented OneTickCloud, a data and advanced analytics service based on its flagship platform, OneTick. The NEO Exchange, Canada’s newest stock exchange, is focused on the original purpose of an exchange – the bringing together of investors looking to build wealth with businesses looking to raise capital for growth. Their strategy works to ensure fairness, liquidity, transparency and efficiency to the benefit of investors, issuers and value-added intermediaries.

OneTickCloud is a securely-hosted managed data and analytics service supporting global equities and futures tick history, reference data, and adjustment factors. It provides on-demand analytics for creating custom datasets using OneMarketData’s market-leading enterprise data management software.

Combined with the underlying technology of OneTick’s high-performance analytics platform, the cloud allows customers to download the data they need and instantly deliver customized calculations on an ad-hoc basis. Further, it eliminates the need to deploy local hardware and maintain expensive infrastructure, allowing customers to focus on application development while significantly reducing their total cost of ownership.

“OneTick’s comprehensive analytics product was an obvious solution for us to gain visibility into market microstructure and allow us to analyze data and demonstrate the value we bring to the Canadian markets,” said Karl Ottywill, Chief Operating Officer at Aequitas NEO Exchange. “OneMarketData’s reliability, market reputation and ability to meet our requirements made it an easy decision to partner with them.”

“We are excited to provide OneTick data and analytics services to the NEO Exchange. We are supporting their efforts to enhance transparency in the Canadian marketplace and helping them demonstrate the positive impact their solutions have on quality of execution for long-term investors,” said Ross Dubin, Global Head of Sales at OneMarketData.

The arrival of Mark Hepsworth at Asset Control signals a shift away from the company’s traditional focus on large enterprise data management solutions and a move towards the provision of more focused use case products such as the Fundamental Review of the Trading Book (FRTB) solution introduced last month and the company’s independent price validation service.

We caught up with Hepsworth on his third day as CEO of Asset Control and after a short break since he departed IDC in February following its takeover by InterContinental Exchange (ICE) late last year. Hepsworth replaces Richard Petti, a former SunGard Data Systems executive who took the helm at Asset Control in October 2013, a couple of months after the company was acquired by Marlin Equity Partners, and left a few months ago.

Hepsworth brings 20 years’ of experience at IDC to Asset Control, most recently as president of EMEA at the data services company and before that as head of the company’s pricing and reference data business based in New York City. He is also no stranger to the private equity ownership model having worked with erstwhile IDC owners Warburg Pincus and Silverlake Partners to transform the company, and continuing to work with private equity firms after leaving IDC.

Considering how he might take Asset Control forward, Hepsworth says: “The company is well respected and established in the data management space, and it has a strong client base. Its core strengths are its product functionality, technology tools and global footprint. With these attributes in place, we can look at how data management requirements are changing and evolve the business.”

Rather than focusing on large-scale, centralised golden copy projects based on the Asset Control platform, Hepsworth plans to nurture smaller, but vital, use case solutions such as the FRTB solution that builds on the company’s AC Risk Data Manager software and focuses on the market data management requirements of the Basel Committee regulation.

He says: “We have the building blocks to provide use case solutions and there is already resonance for these in the market. Part of my job is to decide the next use case solutions we need to develop. They will probably fall into three buckets: regulation, risk and helping clients operate more efficiently and reduce expenses.”

With a clear direction from Marlin Equity Partners to develop Asset Control, day four and beyond will see Hepsworth getting to know the company’s 60-plus customers and working on strategic growth plans.

FIX Trading Community, the non-profit, industry-driven standards body at the heart of global financial trading, today announced the release of new guidelines for the use of FIX in post-trade processing for multi asset classes and a common post-trade framework.

The FIX Global Post-Trade Working Group has been focusing its efforts on how best to resolve the inefficiencies in post-trade workflow for a number of years. Following on from its work with cash equities, the working group assessed a number of different asset classes and how variations in workflow can create issues. Frequent trade breaks and slow resolution times can have a commercial impact as well as have adverse effects on client relationships.

By publishing a standardised and detailed set of guidelines for futures, equity swaps and FX equity options, FIX is addressing these issues by providing a common workflow with minimal differences across asset classes, thereby allowing connection to one or more third parties and/or intermediaries with the same protocol.  With these guidelines, market participants will be able to reduce risk and have the ability to leverage off their current FIX infrastructure in place for trading and, by doing so, minimise implementation time and costs.

Dave Tolman, Principal Services Analyst, Itiviti, Co-chair Global Post Trade Working Group commented, “The focus of the Global Post-Trade Working Group is to improve buy-side post-trade processing. With the release of these guidelines and the use of FIX, they will benefit from lower implementation and maintenance costs, improved ease of use, greater flexibility and, ultimately, lower risk.”  

Scott Atwell, Manager FIX Trading and Connectivity, American Century Investments noted, “As a result of the industry collaboration via the FIX Global Post-Trade Working Group, American Century Investments is receiving FIX 4.4 Confirms for approximately 90% of all of our non-US equity confirmations, and the benefits include efficiency gains, improved straight-through processing, and quicker identification of issues, all of which provide significant risk reduction and cost savings. It is great to see the group’s efforts extending those benefits and standardisation to additional asset classes.”

These new documents can be found here and are currently under public review until 12th October 2016.

DTCC has named James Hollands as managing director, global head of sales and partners. Hollands took up his role at DTCC last month and will lead the company’s sales drive from London.

Hollands joined DTCC from post-trade infrastructure provider TriOptima, where he was head of sales for triResolve. Since starting his career at RBS, where he spent four years in risk management, Hollands has held sales leadership roles in four private equity backed financial solutions firms, all of which achieved successful exits.

From 2004 to 2009, Hollands held the role of sales director EMEA at Sungard Adaptiv, a provider of credit and market risk management tools to investment banks. 

Identifying securities related to a sanctioned domicile or company is a straightforward concept, but in practice, it is a far more challenging task for compliance professionals.

As the summer season comes to an end and holiday makers return to their desks, here at Data Management Review we are working on an exciting programme of activities that we would like to invite you to take part in.

We start the autumn season with a number of topical webinars covering issues including client lifecycle management, data quality, data lineage, sanctions data monitoring, entity data quality, beneficial ownership data, open source symbology and data governance.

There’s also a focus, no surprises here, on regulation, with webinars dedicated to how effectively firms are meeting the data requirements of Solvency II, particularly the tricky issue of look through, and how to meet the myriad data management challenges of Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II (MiFID II). We’ll also look into the requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), an overhaul of existing data privacy rules that will have an impact across capital markets and could require significant changes to data management processes ahead of compliance in May 2018.

On the subject of regulation, we are close to publishing the fourth edition of our Regulatory Data Handbook, a top seller for A-Team and a highly prized possession in our data management community. The handbook updates the details of more than 20 regulations and adds another handful that are coming our way. As well as a full description of each regulation, the handbook includes ‘at a glance’ summaries, timelines, key diary dates and links to useful background information.

The Regulatory Data Handbook will be available to download from the Data Management Review website in October, and we’ll also have hard copies at our events, so you can pick one up at one of our autumn Data Management Summits. If you are a vendor with solutions in the regulatory space, sponsorship opportunities are available, so do get in touch.

Speaking of our Data Management Summits (DMS), they are shaping up really nicely with some great topics and speakers.

Our next London DMS is on 6 October at Hilton Tower Bridge. As well as keynotes and panel discussions, the London event will include both sell-side and buy-side streams dedicated to the data management issues that keep you awake at night. There will also be roundtable discussions where you can share experience and opinions on topics from the role of the chief data officer to bitcoin and blockchain. Also new at London DMS are technology showcase sessions that will provide short demos of products that could help solve your data management dilemmas.

We’re also working on the agenda for our next DMS in New York City, which will be on 17 November at Convene in the financial district. Topics range from the data management response to ongoing regulation to data governance, KYC, client onboarding, and all the pain points in between. DMS NYC also includes streams dedicated to both the sell-side and buy-side.

Topping it all are the A-Team Data Management Review Awards, which are now in their fourth year and an established event in the data management community. Voting for your best vendors will open soon, so watch this space, and we’ll let you know the results on the day of our awards ceremony in London on 11 November.

So, lots going on, plenty to take part in and we look forward to meeting you soon at one of our autumn events.

If you are interested in speaking at our events, please get in touch by emailing speakers@datamanagementreview.com. To find out more about sponsorship opportunities for vendors across our webinars, events and handbooks, please contact Jo Webb for more information: +44 (0)7468 560 555, jo@a-teamgroup.com.

The quality of your entity data has a significant impact on your ability as a financial institution to make informed decisions, be certain that you are trading and settling with the right entities, manage your risk correctly, and ensure you are in compliance with the rules and regulations that impact your business.

Are you ready for the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)?

With the GDPR deadline less than two years away, the pressure is on for organizations to understand how they will comply. Proper data management is part of the answer, but tying these efforts into a data governance framework to manage data protection is key to meeting – and sustaining – GDPR compliance.

AxiomSL, the leading provider of regulatory reporting and risk management solutions, was selected by Commerzbank, Germany’s second largest bank, to deliver the SEC 15c3-1 as well as other regulatory mandates such as the Financial and Operational Combined Uniform Single (FOCUS), Treasury International Capital (TIC), Off Balance Sheet reporting (OBS) and additional US Broker Dealer-based reports. The bank opted to implement AxiomSL’s integrated platform because of its ability to address complex data infrastructure and to automate regulatory reporting requirements on one platform.

US broker-dealers are looking for ways to keep up with the stricter regimen for compliance regulations that include myriad rules such as SEC Rule 17a-5 that requires testing and auditor sign off of computations performed to comply with the Uniform Net Capital Rule (15c3-1) and the Customer Protection Rule (15c3-3) among many others. Firms are currently grappling with legacy systems that are aggregated with manual spreadsheets to support their reporting processes. In addition, compliance requirements have moved increasingly from post-trade data gathering and analysis to more near-real-time analytics and reporting. This shift has amplified the need for broker-dealers to re-evaluate their data management platform to meet the mandated integration of structured and unstructured data sets for regulatory reporting requirements.

“We are delighted Commerzbank has selected AxiomSL’s technology,” said Alex Tsigutkin, AxiomSL CEO.  “Institutions can optimize their existing IT infrastructure by implementing a flexible data-management architecture, with an analytical and reporting layer and aggregation capabilities, which will address multiple regulations on one integrated platform. In other words, firms should use an integrated platform to perform position and transaction reporting, for capital computation and liquidity measurements, as well TIC reports and other reporting with drill-down capabilities back to the original source data.”

AxiomSL’s strategic platform delivers the robustness to comply with industry regulations and provides the scalability to meet multiple regulatory reporting requirements with greater performance and accuracy, while ensuring full transparency and control. This user configurable platform delivers rules-based flexibility through visual business rules that enable business analysts to configure reporting logic without traditional programing skills requirement. In addition, AxiomSL’s platform interfaces with Commerzbank’s existing data sources, without any data conversion and automates workflow for millions of rows of data for transactions to be processed into intra-day, daily, monthly, quarterly and annual reports in order to adapt swiftly to regulatory mandates.

The European Union’s upcoming regulation on Packaged Retail Investment and Insurance Products (PRIIPs), which requires banks and insurers to provide a Key Information Document (KID) to retail investors, has hit a bump in the road following the rejection of Level 2 Regulatory Technical Standards (RTS) for the regulation by the Economic and Monetary Affairs (ECON) Committee of the European Parliament.

While PRIIPS is due to come into force on 31 December 2016, the deadline could be compromised if the European Commission fails to provide amended RTS that meet the approval of the next European Parliament session taking place from September 12-15, 2016. Despite the uncertainty caused by the ECON Committee’s decision on the RTS, firms subject to the regulation are expected to continue to implement compliance solutions as the initial deadline is already very tight and any delay would provide breathing space and more development time, but no excess.

If RTS presented to the European Parliament later this month are again rejected, one possibility would be the introduction of the legislation without technical standards, although this is unlikely given scepticism among members of the European Parliament about how this could work. Alternatively, the legislation could be delayed until the RTS are agreed, but this would require the Commission to introduce new regulation, a process that some Commission representatives have said they do not want to trigger.

While there is speculation in the market about a delay to the PRIIPs KID deadline, solution providers say they, and their customers, are not slowing down their efforts to achieve compliance by December 31, 2016.

Phil Lynch, head of markets, products and strategy at SIX Financial Information, says: “There is no signal from the European Commission that it will move the deadline. We continue to feel a sense of urgency in getting our customers up and running. The vote on the RTS at the European Parliament later this month is an opportunity for more clarity, but our platform is ready to go and we can adjust it to meet the RTS when they are agreed.”

Silverfinch acknowledges the ECON Committee’s rejection of the RTS as ‘an honest realisation that what had been set out was inadequate’. It also notes that the December 31, 2016 deadline could mean PRIIPs manufacturers have to reduce the number of products they offer if they cannot match them up with KIDs before the deadline.

Ashley Smith, senior vice president of business development at Silverfinch, comments: “The rejection of the RTS doesn’t mean the regulation will be delayed, but it is a key piece and could cause a delay. Meantime, until we see if there will be a delay, Silverfinch and its clients are continuing to prepare for the regulation and our platform is in place. That said, there will be relief all round if there is a delay. The timeline is very tight and we should remember that it took the industry over a year to implement UCITS KIDs.”

Opus Global (“Opus”), the leading provider of SaaS-based compliance solutions, announced today the appointment of Emanuele “Manny” Conti as Chief Executive Officer. Conti brings more than 20 years of leadership experience in the risk management and data analytics industries, with a proven track record of building global growth-oriented businesses. He was most recently CEO of Kroll Inc. and before that, President of the North America and International divisions of Dun & Bradstreet.

Opus was co-founded by GTCR, a leading Chicago-based private equity firm and Doug Bergeron, former CEO of VeriFone, who will now serve as Executive Chairman. Since 2014 Opus has more than quadrupled in size and now includes a fast-growing and impressive number of the world’s largest corporations as customers.

Conti said, “I am proud to join a company whose mission is anchored in helping its clients solve important and complex compliance risks such as AML, KYC, ABAC (anti-bribery and anti-corruption) and third party management. I look forward to continuing to drive innovation at the company and helping our clients address their ever-changing regulatory requirements.”

Opus has rapidly built its SaaS-based compliance platform through the successful acquisitions of Hiperos and Alacra (acquired in June 2014 and September 2015, respectively). The company has already created an unmatched combination of reference data, third party management software and know-your-customer workflow solutions. Opus’s vision is to build the preeminent regulatory technology, risk and compliance business and has a $500 million commitment to fund the strategy.

Bergeron said, “We are excited to have Manny join Opus at this important stage of growth for our company. I believe his extensive experience in the risk and compliance space will help accelerate the innovation efforts required to meet the dynamic compliance needs of our clients.  He is a strong leader with a proven track record of results that I believe will help us achieve our full potential.”

In an increasingly hostile world, monitoring sanctions lists, politically exposed persons and other watch lists has become complex, but the buck doesn’t stop here with financial institutions needing to monitor and manage not only sanctions lists, but also securities related to sanctioned domiciles and companies.

This is not as easy as it may first appear. As well as identifying sanctioned entities and their issued securities, you need to uncover global holdings of more than 50% and work out whether securities issued by these domestic and foreign subsidiaries are also in scope. Then there is the challenge of verifying beneficial ownership by sanctioned individuals.

Register for Webinar: Meeting the high stakes challenge of effective sanctions data monitoring

As sanctions lists and other watch lists are constantly changed, the problem of adding the right securities to your ‘do not trade’ list is difficult to solve and the penalties of getting it wrong can be high in terms of large fines and reputational damage.

But solutions are emerging that ease the burden and maximise trading opportunities by reducing the need to block trades in non-sanctioned securities. To find out more about the challenges of monitoring securities related to sanctioned entities and solutions that will help you get it right sign up for the A-Team webinar ‘Meeting the high stakes challenge of effective sanctions data monitoring’.

truePTS, the independent post-trade service provider for derivatives processing, has announced the launch of truePTS Counterparty Manager, a counterparty data management solution developed in partnership with LEI Smart.

“truePTS Counterparty Manager ensures consistent compliance for our users by integrating their service to streamline and aggregate connectivity usage and distribution of counterparty data,” said Zohar Hod, CEO of truePTS. “Regardless of how a client’s legal entity information enters the truePTS work flow, LEI Smart’s matching and validation process ensures the most accurate, reliable and up-to-date counterparty data information which is ultimately used in clearing and reporting the trade.”

Utilizing LEI Smart resources underscores the transition that the industry is currently going through and that the quality of counterparty data is now integral at trade entry so that trades are successfully processed and reported. “This partnership ensures that the counterparty data provided by clients is reported accurately and at the same time allows them to benefit from operational risk reduction and lower costs of processing,” said Ben Lis, founder of LEI Smart.

“The right way to deliver LEI Smart to the buy-side is as part of an integrated post-trade offering and truePTS provides that,” said Lis. “Our partnership will allow the buy-side to message their gold copy legal entity and counterparty information to trading partners and service providers. Firms will benefit not only from receiving this information in an automated fashion but also from receiving automatic alerts when it changes.”

Through their combined strengths of optimizing operational efficiency, both truePTS and LEI Smart embody the same business objective of developing the next generation of post-trade services.

The service is currently in preview release.

The International Swaps and Derivatives Association, Inc. (ISDA) has announced the launch of a new industry initiative to develop standard data requirements, as part of an effort to facilitate compliance with the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision’s Fundamental Review of the Trading Book (FRTB).

The initiative is aimed at reaching a common industry consensus on the interpretation of risk-factor modellability rules under the FRTB, and a shared set of business requirements to support risk-factor assessment and data capture.

The project is in response to FRTB rules that stipulate that risk factors must meet certain requirements before they can be included in bank internal models. For example, a risk factor must have at least 24 observations per year, with a maximum period of one month between observations. An industry impact study conducted by ISDA and other industry associations earlier this year found that non-modellable risk factors (NMRFs) could account for 30% of the internal models approach capital charge.

ISDA will establish a working group to lead and facilitate industry efforts to develop standard data requirements. The working group will engage with both data vendors and regulators throughout the project.