News Centre

The FCA’s Role In Promoting Innovation - Speech By Christopher Woolard, Director Of Strategy And Competition At The FCA, Delivered At The BBA FinTech Banking Conference

Date 22/09/2016

Key points:

• Project Innovate's aim has been to provide innovators whether large or small with some support to navigate the regulatory system, to reduce the barriers to innovation whilst maintaining the same standards of regulation and consumer protection. A few days ago, we passed the 300 mark in terms of firms assisted.
• Interest in the Sandbox has been high and total applications have far exceeded our expectations. Of 69 applications, we have accepted 24 to develop towards testing and all come from a wide range of sectors including retail banking, insurance, advice and profiling and IPO.
• The second regulatory innovation is the Advice Unit, in which nine firms were successful out of the 19 applications we reviewed in the initial tranche. And of these nine firms, eight are established financial services, who want to bring automated advice to the market at scale.
• We will look to encourage innovation and adoption in technology through our RegTech work, working collaboratively to unlock the complexities and costs of regulation in new and creative ways.

BT Joins Forces With Microsoft To Simplify Hybrid Cloud - BT Customers To Benefit From Improved Choice Of Cloud Services With Simplified Billing And Direct Access To Microsoft Azure

Date 22/09/2016

BT today announces BT Compute for Microsoft Azure, a new service that allows BT customers to orderMicrosoft Azure alongside BT’s own cloud services through its award winning Compute Management System (CMS) online management tool. The service enables customers to build hybrid cloud infrastructure with a single service wrap, contract and on a single bill.

Percival Will Deliver Solution To New CSD In Iceland

Date 22/09/2016

Percival signed a contract today with a new CSD organisation being launched in Iceland. 

BrickVest Enhances Institutional Rating And Research Capabilities With A New Senior Appointment - Rémi Antonini Will Lead The Development Of BrickVest Ratings To Make Real Estate Investment More Transparent And Comparable

Date 22/09/2016

BrickVest, the London-based real estate crowd-investing platform, has today announced the appointment of Rémi Antonini as head of the BrickVest Rating Committee, which will strengthen the company’s institutional research and rating capabilities as it continues to expand its range of real estate investment opportunities. In this role Rémi will lead the development of BrickVest Ratings, a proprietary algorithmic-based risk rating programme for real estate investments to be launched in early 2017.

Inaugural EDHEC-Risk Smart Beta Day In Partnership With ERI Scientific Beta To Take Place In Amsterdam On October 13

Date 22/09/2016

The inaugural EDHEC-Risk Smart Beta Day Europe, organised by EDHEC-Risk Institute in partnership with ERI Scientific Beta, will take place at The Amstel Intercontinental in Amsterdam on October 13, 2016. The one-day conference will showcase the latest conceptual advances and research results in smart beta investing.

MillenniumIT Showcases Real-Time Post Trade Technology Capability

Date 22/09/2016

• Millennium PostTradeTM is a real-time CCP clearing, settlement and risk platform, designed to enable harmonisation and operational savings across business lines
• Enables real-time cross-asset portfolio risk management, while improving operational resilience and reducing running costs
• Modern integrated IT framework will boost business agility and reduce time to market, supporting current and future work-flows
• Includes innovative use of graphics processing unit (GPU) technology to provide real-time risk management

SWIFT Examines Application Of Financial Business Standards To Distributed Ledger Technology And Smart Contracts - New Paper Highlights Opportunity For Financial Industry To Coordinate Efforts Using Common Messaging And Data Standards

Date 22/09/2016

SWIFT announces today the availability of a new paper investigating the application of business standards to distributed ledger technology (DLT) and smart contracts (SC). The paper examines the need for the financial industry to find agreement on the format of shared data, business processes, roles and responsibilities so that these new technologies can be used to efficiently address complex problems in financial services.

Liquidnet Expands Execution And Quantitative Services Team - Two New Hires Further Grow The Firm’s Execution Consulting Service For Institutional Investors

Date 22/09/2016

Liquidnet, the global institutional trading network, today announced the appointments of two senior hires to its European Execution & Quantitative Services (EQS) team. Launched in 2014, the EQS group advises Liquidnet’s buy-side Members and institutional clients on algorithmic strategies, trade analytics, and quantitative products and services.

KGI Selects The Technancial Company To Manage Risk And Grow Their Business

Date 22/09/2016

KGI Ong Capital and The Technancial Company (TTC) announced today that KGI will utilise TTC’s JANUS™ Risk Manager platform (JRM) to enhance their client services with real time monitoring.

BrokerTec And MTS Add Spain Index To RepoFunds Rate - New Addition Expands Successful Hedging And Price Discovery Indices

Date 22/09/2016

BrokerTec, ICAP’s global electronic fixed income trading platform, and MTS, a leading fixed income electronic trading venue in Europe that is majority-owned by the London Stock Exchange Group, announce today that they are further expanding the RepoFunds Rate (RFR) indices by adding a Spanish Repo index. RepoFunds Rate, launched in 2012, is a series of daily European indices covering the German, French, Italian and Pan-European Repo markets.