Friday, November 1, 2024

Trading Technologies Establishes Platform Services Business Unit

Keith Todd, Trading Technologies

CHICAGO, October 3, 2024 — Trading Technologies International, Inc. (TT), a global capital markets technology platform provider, today announced the creation of a Platform Services business unit, bringing together the company’s global Product Development and Services teams into a single group. Jason Shaffer assumes the new role of Chief Platform Officer with responsibility for leading the newly integrated unit.

The move represents the final organization change following the establishment of six lines of business – Futures & Options, Fixed Income, FX, Data & Analytics, Compliance and QTS (Quantitative Trading Solutions) – at the start of the year.

TT CEO Keith Todd said: “TT is an enterprise platform business delivering its array of functionality to support capital markets trading firms. This business unit will provide the core platform on which the lines of business will build features and run all operational services. The platform, which has already handled more than 2.5 billion transactions in 2024, is the foundation of and accelerant for our current and future lines of business.”

Vasco Sousa, who has served as Chief Services Officer for nearly two years, helping develop the services team and processes, left TT at the end of September to pursue new opportunities.

About Trading Technologies

Trading Technologies (www.tradingtechnologies.com) is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) technology platform provider to the global capital markets industry. The company’s award-winning TT® platform connects to the world’s major international exchanges and liquidity venues in listed derivatives alongside a growing number of asset classes, including fixed income, foreign exchange (FX) and cryptocurrencies. The TT platform delivers advanced tools for trade execution and order management, market data solutions, analytics, trade surveillance, risk management, clearing, post-trade allocation and infrastructure services to the world’s leading sell-side institutions, buy-side firms and exchanges. The company’s blue-chip client base includes the Tier 1 banks as well as brokers, money managers, hedge funds, proprietary traders, Commodity Trading Advisors (CTAs), commercial hedgers and risk managers. These firms rely on the TT ecosystem to manage their end-to-end trading operations. In addition, exchanges utilize TT’s technology to deliver innovative solutions to their market participants. TT also strategically partners with technology companies to make their complementary offerings available to Trading Technologies’ global client base through the TT ecosystem.

Corlytics Restructures and Expands US Operations 

Corlytics, a global RegTech consolidator, has announced significant expansion and the appointment of a new leadership team across all major functions in the US market. 

John Byrne, CEO and founder of Corlytics, said: “We have restructured to create Corlytics Group, integrating our industry-leading regulatory and compliance intelligence businesses.” 

John Byrne

“Our major investment in the US reinforces North America as our key market. I am proud that we have grown our existing talented team and attracted a further A-team of seasoned professionals from top industry players to drive our ongoing leadership on the ground,” he said in a statement. 

The newly appointed US leadership team will be headed up by industry veteran, Aidan Houlihan formerly of Napier.ai and BNY Mellon with over 15 years in financial services. 

Other team members include Freddie Frith as VP of Sales North America, formerly Global Head of Sales at Clausematch; Lana Chan as Head of Customer Success North America, formerly head of customer success for North America at Fenergo; Chad Schaefer as Head of the Professional Services Team North America, formerly Global Head of Professional Services at Clausematch; Rory McGrath as Head of Product Consulting North America, formerly Head of PreSales EMEA; and Liam Cuddy as Senior Consultant North America, formerly Head of Sales North America for Fenergo.

This expansion builds on the momentum from the recent addition of three C-level executives: Steve Barnes as Group Technology Officer, Oisin Boydell as Chief Data Officer, and Ray O’Donnell as Chief Tech Architect. 

Following a significant investment from Verdane earlier this year for a majority equity stake in the company, Corlytics continues its ambitious growth trajectory following major acquisitions in the last 12 months, including Deloitte’s RegTech platform in May 2024, and ClauseMatch, and ING’s SPARQ in 2023. 

Since 2018, Corlytics has been a significant player in the US, working with 40% of the top 30 Systematically Important Financial Institutions (SIFI) globally. 

“Corlytics boasts over 100 clients globally spanning banking, insurance and payments solutions, having successfully grown to become the pre-eminent regulatory technology player in the market.  We are planning further innovative developments and acquisitions,” Houlihan commented.

“This will allow our clients and financial institutions globally, to have the most robust and compliant systems possible. Our plan is to go far beyond compliance and risk management to develop a deep understanding to use analytics as a business advantage,” he said.

Further ambitious growth is planned over the next two years, with the global RegTech market anticipated to grow at a CAGR of 23.6% between 2024-2032.

Since 2020 Corlytics has grown 60% per annum, predominantly driven by its core regulatory compliance products.

Corlytics management team forecasts double digit growth of approximately 35% CAGR through to 2028. 

Completely new products, content classes and additional acquisitions are expected to contribute further to growth by 2028.  

“The next 12 months at Corlytics will be transformative for the world’s largest financial services firms, enabling them to seamlessly comply with and implement ever-changing regulations,” Byrne said.

Bridgewise Unveils Conversational AI Investment Tool

Bridgewise, a capital markets intelligence platform, has launched BRIDGET, its Conversational AI Investment Tool, designed specifically for the institutional investment sector, including brokers and trading platforms.

Leveraging the flexibility, convenience, and capabilities of large language models (LLM) AI, BRIDGET transforms traditional investment intelligence reports into dynamic, interactive conversations, and provides regulatory-compliant investment recommendations that are delivered through its customizable, multilingual platform.

Gaby Diamant

“Bridgewise’s BRIDGET is a conversational AI investment tool that presents a significant leap forward for the global investment and securities industry. By integrating advanced AI with regulatory compliance, we are not only enhancing the efficiency and accuracy of investment decisions but also ensuring that these decisions are made within a secure and compliant framework,” said Gaby Diamant, Co-Founder and CEO of Bridgewise.

“This tool is a game-changer for financial institutions looking to stay ahead in a rapidly evolving sector, and to empower their analysts and investors to interact with data in a more intuitive and insightful manner, thereby enhancing decision-making processes,” he added.

In today’s fast-paced financial environment, analysts and investors face numerous challenges, including information overload, time constraints, and the need for precise, actionable insights.

Unlike other existing LLMs which may generate quirky and interesting responses but do not deliver reliable investment recommendations, Bridgewise’s BRIDGET offers regulatory-compliant investment insights, including specific buy/sell recommendations for stocks.

BRIDGET also addresses several key AI chat-related drawbacks, such as:

  • Lack of Opinions or Investment Recommendations: Competing AIs refrain from recommending one stock over another, while BRIDGETTM provides actionable, regulatory-compliant advice, including specific buy/sell recommendations.
  • Finance-Focused Expertise: Unlike general LLMs, BRIDGET uses a specialized Micro Language Model (MLM) tailored for conversations about investments and capital markets, offering a high level of expertise and precision.
  • Hallucinations: Other AIs often generate inaccurate or illogical suggestions, such as recommending non-existent stocks or those with poor fundamentals. BRIDGET is designed to overcome these pitfalls, ensuring reliability in its investment advice because its MLM has been exclusively trained to understand and address the nuances of investment-specific topics. 

Research has estimated that generative AI (Gen AI) could add between $200 billion and $340 billion in value annually, or 2.8 to 4.7 percent of total industry revenues across the global banking sector.

Against this high-growth potential, GenAI has emerged as a crucial enabler of innovation and transformation, empowering financial institutions to exceed the expectations of today’s sophisticated customers and investors, who are increasingly demanding faster, more convenient and timely services.

For the finance institutions who serve global and regional institutional investors, this expectation is arguably compounded by the dynamic and fast-changing as well as the cross-border regulatory compliance requirements. 

This expansion is part of Bridgewise’s vision to leverage its technology and AI intelligence capabilities to revolutionize how capital markets operate.

Bridgewise is currently available in more than 25 languages and across 15 markets and has a coverage of more than 50,000 global financial instruments.

Bloomberg Launches Intraday Quant Pricing Solution for Investment Research

Bloomberg has announced the launch of its fully customizable intraday quant pricing solution for Investment Research, the Open-High-Low-Close (OHLC) Bar product.

Ali Mohsin

“Quant customers were previously compelled to use standard, pre-made OHLC bar datasets for their tick history use cases. Any customization would increase the complexity of their workflow, requiring raw ticks, significant storage and a specialized tick database for large-scale use,” said Ali Mohsin, Global Product Manager, Tick History at Bloomberg.

“Now, for the first time, Bloomberg customers can manage this complexity out-of-the-box with transparency, for any use case across both the buy- and sell-side.” 

The new solution simplifies quant workflows by empowering customers to quickly create intraday pricing datasets either based on Bloomberg’s templates or fully customizable pricing, using their own preferred combination of trade condition codes. As a result, customers can unlock insights and alpha faster.

The OHLC Bar product is Bloomberg’s latest quant pricing solution, following the release of its cross-asset Tick History Data, which together are part of a robust suite of Quant Research Data solutions the company continues to invest in building out. 

Bloomberg’s OHLC Bar product makes its Tick History, traditionally a very large dataset, easier to manage and store, so less time is spent wrangling the data.

Bloomberg’s premium high-quality Tick History Data allows firms to access both tick-by-tick historical intraday quotes and trades and now, OHLC bars.

The solution includes data from over 350 global exchanges and Bloomberg’s industry-recognized fixed income pricing, and provides access to over 70 million instruments, making it a comprehensive solution that firms can use for their back, middle and front office workflows. The data is application-ready, accessible via Rest API and natively available on AWS, Azure and GCP, and is also accessible for enterprise-wide use via Data License at data.bloomberg.com.

Bloomberg’s OHLC Bar product can generate bars across global equities, global futures, FX, swaps, fixed income and global options. It offers a number of key benefits:

  • Customization – Firms can customize their OHLC bar to suit their use case and application. This includes choosing which inputs to use to generate a bar, creating a custom time interval and receiving the bar in Parquet or CSV format.
  • Filtering – Firms have access to Bloomberg’s templates to exclude auction indications, duplicative trades and block or erroneous trades. They also have the ability to modify these templates to add and remove additional codes.
  • Transparency – Bloomberg provides firms with transparency into the metadata of its OHLC bars including important timestamps, counts and condition codes used to create a bar.
  • Bespoke Solution – Firms can create a bespoke OHLC bar that caters to a specific use case or application by generating bars that only include specific trade conditions.

Bloomberg’s Research Data solutions are interoperable and accessible via our Real-Time solutions, Data License (DL) or data management solution, Data License Plus (DL+), as well as third party technologies and all major cloud providers, allowing firms to seamlessly put the data to use in their trading strategies.

“With ever-increasing volumes of data and the adoption of new AI techniques, quant analysts and systematic teams face significant complexity in evaluating, acquiring and productionizing data in their strategies,” said Angana Jacob, Head of Enterprise Research Data at Bloomberg.

“Our Research Data solutions allow firms to focus on trade ideas and reduce their time to alpha by providing a robust set of quant-ready pricing and fundamentals data products that are easy to evaluate, backtest and implement. Bloomberg’s customizable OHLC Bar product is a significant addition to our comprehensive multi-asset data suite for quant customers to build and trade their models.”

TradingBlock Unveils Broker-Neutral Platform

TradingBlock, a provider of custom trading technology solutions for institutions, individuals and Registered Investment Advisors (RIAs), has added an executing broker-neutral platform for professional traders, active traders and asset managers.

The executing broker-neutral platform allows traders to design a custom execution environment around their unique strategy while reducing the limitations of being tied to a single platform, single executing broker and limited set of order routing algorithms.

“The launch of the executing broker-neutral platform signals yet another way TradingBlock is committed to being made for the way you trade,” said TradingBlock Institutional Trading Manager Gino Stella.

Gino Stella

“It not only gives traders access to their choice of executing brokers and order routing algorithms but also provides built-in order routing redundancy when they need it and offers access to custom reporting to meet varied portfolio reporting requirements.”

With this platform, TradingBlock is delivering unparalleled flexibility and control to its clients, helping them optimize their trading environments without being locked into specific systems.

Traders now have a choice of professional trading software as well as access to multiple executing brokers and diverse order routing algorithms.

Built-in order routing redundancy, which provides added security, ensures uninterrupted operations, while tailored pricing offers the benefit of personalized pricing schedules, rebates and transparent pass-through costs.

The launch of the executing broker-neutral platform comes as TradingBlock offers mini-prime brokerage services for smaller funds, giving them access to sophisticated prime brokerage solutions usually reserved for larger institutions.

This includes security lending, short selling and capital-efficient clearing solutions — without passing high costs to the client.

With access to multiple third-party brokers and trading platforms, those using TradingBlock can choose the best execution strategy that suits their specific goals, ensuring flexibility and transparency in every trade.

Will the Industry Litigate SEC Equity Market Structure Changes?

After the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) adopted amendments to certain rules under Regulation NMS on September 18, the industry’s response was ambivalent at best.

The regulatory update came out on the first day of the Security Traders Association’s 91st Annual Market Structure Conference, and many of the panel discussions pivoted to this topic, including speculation about whether or not market infrastructure providers and/or market participants will sue the SEC.

Traders Magazine reached out to Andrew P. Blake, Partner, Sidley, about the likelihood that the industry takes the SEC to court. Blake advises a wide array of financial services clients on regulatory, transactional, compliance and enforcement matters arising under the jurisdiction of the SEC, U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA). 

Andrew P. Blake

Do you think this might go to court? 

Yes, it seems likely the equities exchanges will challenge the part of the rulemaking that reduced access fee caps. Those reductions will impact the pricing and fee structures that the exchanges use to incentivize market participants to trade on their platform.

What specifically about the equity market structure rule changes might the SEC have overreached on and not have basis to implement? 

The SEC has a reasoned basis for the changes it adopted. But any time the government is involved in capping fees that market participants may charge for services, it is possible that action will be challenged as overreach. For greater context, the SEC previously adopted access fee caps under Reg NMS in 2005 – and so this most recent rulemaking is simply tightening the access fee caps.

What market group would most likely sue (Exchanges? Brokers? Investment managers?)

The exchanges that facilitate trading in equities are the most likely to sue because they are the ones most directly affected by the reduced fee caps. That said, in the comment phase of the proposal other industry participants also expressed a view that any changes to access fee caps should be tied to changes to tick sizes. Accordingly, if the exchanges are successful in advocating that the access fee cap changes should be overturned, other market participants may be of a view that there also should be no change to tick sizes.

What precedent is there for these types of cases?

A judicial challenge is likely to be in line with previous challenges of federal agency rulemaking on grounds that the revised access fee cap changes are arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act.

T. Rowe Price Forms T. Rowe Price Investment Institute

Justin Thomson, T. Rowe Price

T. ROWE PRICE ANNOUNCES FORMATION OF THE T. ROWE PRICE INVESTMENT INSTITUTE

26-year company veteran Justin Thomson to lead new initiative focused on investment talent development and institutional/intermediary client education

BALTIMORE (October 1, 2024) – T. Rowe Price, a global investment management firm and leader in retirement, announced it is forming the T. Rowe Price Investment Institute for the dual purposes of enhancing the firm’s investment talent development and strengthening the delivery of T. Rowe Price’s proprietary investment insights to clients. Justin Thomson, head of International Equity and a chief investment officer, has been named to head the Institute, which is scheduled to launch on January 1, 2025.

Thomson will create the Institute’s charter, which is expected to involve establishing a center of excellence for developing differentiated investment thought leadership and internal investment talent development. The work of the Institute will include curating and highlighting insights generated by T. Rowe Price’s leading investment research organization and developing educational content to help clients and T. Rowe Price investment professionals augment investment decision-making. As progress accelerates into next year under Thomson’s leadership, the Institute will pursue engagements with experts in business and academia and with other institutions on topics such as portfolio construction, behavioral finance, geopolitics, and others. The Institute will facilitate collaboration between these experts and T. Rowe Price investment professionals, developing insights that can be shared with clients.

Thomson is a 26-year veteran of T. Rowe Price who helped conceive the firm’s International Small-Cap Equity Strategy and managed it for many years before stepping into his current leadership role in 2020. He has also been an important contributor to T. Rowe Price’s Asset Allocation Committee for the last nine years. Thomson is based in London, and his total investment experience spans more than 33 years.

“Justin has a demonstrable record of success throughout his long tenure at T. Rowe Price,” said Eric Veiel, head of Global Investments and a chief investment officer. “He was a talented portfolio manager, and he has always been an influential voice within the investment organization. He is valued as a leader and mentor, and he’s highly respected by his colleagues and clients. The impressive skill set he has built over the course of his career makes him the perfect match for this important new role.”

“The T. Rowe Price Investment Institute will be an important educational resource for our investment professionals and our clients,” Thomson said. “Risks are everywhere in the markets today. More than ever, investors and advisors need a place where they can find timely and actionable insights from people who are on the ground asking the right questions of the companies that are shaping the present and future of the financial markets and global economies. That’s why the time is right to establish this Institute and it’s why I also believe the time is right for cost-effective, skilled active asset management. Our intent with the Institute is to help investors do more than keep pace with markets by enabling better, more informed investment decisions.”

The Importance of Centralized Legal Data Management for Financial Organizations

Will Toomey, Acadia

By Will Thomey, Co-Head of Business Development, Acadia

In today’s financial markets, organizations face the daunting task of managing vast amounts of trading documentation, a complex undertaking which underscores the urgent need for a more streamlined approach. Legal documentation forms the backbone of financial markets, essential towards promoting transparency, reducing risk, and protecting the rights of the involved parties.

Trading documentation, which includes both legal and operational data, significantly impacts various internal and external entities, such as counterparties, custodians, and Central Counterparties. All these participants have a vested interest in maintaining clean and accurate data. However, the industry commonly fails to capture and operationalize this data properly, necessitating change.

Moreover, many firms have maintained relationships and corresponding documents for years, if not decades, evolving significantly over time. The combination of the breadth of legal data, its fluidity over time, and the duration of these relationships results in a large and complex surface area to manage.

RISKS OF DISPARATE LEGAL DATA

Financial firms are complex in structure, and data is a key component in improving and simplifying the operating environment. Organizations should not store legal data in disparate systems for multiple reasons, but often, this is the case, and there is no golden source of legal data. What are some of the key reasons to avoid falling into this trap? 

  • Economic: Trading often requires data from various systems and infrastructures, therefore ensuring that all are updated with the latest and most relevant information becomes challenging. Data which is not captured, inaccurate, amended, or expired can lead to errors in trade pricing and discounting, directly impacting the trading desk’s P&L.
  • Risk Management and Decision Making: Disparate systems make it challenging to obtain a unified view of agreement data across the organization. This lack of visibility limits the ability to generate accurate and comprehensive reports, hindering critical insights and strategic decision-making. Manual data transfer and synchronization efforts increase the risk of errors and inconsistencies. 
  • Operational Integration: Operations should work from the same legal data used within trading, risk, and other departments within the firm. Inaccurate legal data in the operating environment is likely to increase the volume of disputes and discrepancies, potentially leading to capital impacts. Relying on multiple legal data sources increases operational risk and the potential for loss.
  • Governance: Ensuring consistent data governance practices is challenging without a centralized system. Without a golden source of legal data, enforcing data standards and definitions can be difficult, and document organization is likely to be haphazard. Tracking amendments and maintaining a clear audit trail for data modifications remains difficult and elusive without digitization.

Modernizing trading markets through a centralized and integrated data storage system can help mitigate these issues and streamline agreement management processes, addressing key business and regulatory concerns while improving decision-making. Having a golden source repository is essential for both legacy documents and new documents and amendments. It is crucial to understand everything from simple operational parameters to the complex optionality embedded in documentation to adequately mitigate and manage risk within your business.

What does this mean for the buy-side?

As is often the case, the sell-side may well have a more complicated time when it comes to regulatory oversight and the sheer volume of documentation that they contend with. Despite that, given the inter-connected nature of financial markets, spillover is inevitable whenever there are issues. In the time since the global financial crisis, the evolution of margin and collateral across the market has required the buy-side to become more sophisticated in terms of how they think about collateral. 

Buy-side firms often benefit from agility when utilizing and improving data. Where alpha generation is concerned, being fast and first has always been the case. The metrics that lead to cost inefficiency are on the radar and more critical than ever. 

Buy-side firms must consider:

  1. Data Consolidation: Consolidating legal data from various sources and systems to ensure accurate pricing, risk, reporting and decision-making.
  2. Data Analysis and Insights: Leveraging advanced data analytics to deliver alpha opportunities. Extending this approach will enable them to enhance returns further, especially in relation to margin costs. 
  3. Data Management: Establishing robust data governance frameworks to ensure data integrity, accuracy, and compliance with regulatory requirements. 

Maintaining the status quo hampers efficiency and agility within and across business functions and the wider industry. Buy-side firms can benefit from centralizing legal agreement data and improving the data quality to enhance profitability, risk management, operational capabilities, and decision-making. Even if the buy-side has a smaller challenge relative to a Global Systemically Important Bank, they are by no means immune to the challenges of managing legal agreement data themselves while also ensuring that the banks/brokers they transact with are correctly representing and using this shared legal agreement data (minimizing the aforementioned risks of incorrect pricing, valuation, disputes, etc.).

WHAT ARE FIRMS DOING TO TACKLE THE ISSUE? 

Progressive, forward-looking firms are tackling the legal data issue head-on. Many have recognized that having a golden source of legal data across trading businesses is essential for pricing, risk management, and collateral management. While this has long been understood, we are now witnessing the evolution of legal data being gold-plated, further enhancing its value and reliability.

As with all data projects, building a robust data model is a critical starting point. Over the past decade, most organizations have adopted a higher degree of common standards, such as standard legal agreement templates and standard codes and identifiers. However, these standards are often not fully adopted or comprehensive.

Most data projects can be categorized into digitizing old legacy documentation or executing new documentation within a more digital framework. For legacy documentation, digitization providers with varying degrees of Optical Character Recognition sophistication are working to build capabilities that use scanned copies to translate documentation into a data model. These tools represent a significant advance from fully manual digitization but still often struggle with language nuances, bespoke documentation, and complex tables. Many firms are now exploring the use of Machine Learning and inserting aspects of Large Language Models (LLMs) to further improve digitization accuracy.  Thus far, the technology is promising, but still cannot be fully entrusted and thus requires manual review and/or manual digitization to plug known limitations.  

For new documentation, tools are available to enable the negotiation and execution of documents within a more natively digital framework. These tools are expected to grow in use, but the legal profession has been resistant to changing the way documentation is written, negotiated, and executed. Regardless of the type of data project, all require consistency across data libraries and definitions, including the data capture process, coverage model, and data accuracy.

As we look towards the future of financial markets, a unified approach to managing legal data is not just a competitive advantage but a necessity. Regulatory bodies increasingly emphasize the need for firms to streamline their data management processes to ensure sound risk and liquidity management practices across the organization. For buy-side firms, the benefits of consolidating legal agreement data, deriving actionable insights, and establishing robust data governance frameworks cannot be overstated. 

The time to act is now to improve data integrity and accuracy, which will ultimately lead to enhanced profitability and operational capabilities within the industry.

TD Securities Charged in Spoofing Scheme

Firm also failed to supervise the head of its U.S. Treasuries desk

Washington D.C., Sept. 30, 2024 — 

The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced charges against registered broker-dealer TD Securities (USA) LLC for manipulating the U.S. Treasury cash securities market through an illicit trading strategy known as spoofing. The bank was also charged for failing to supervise the then-head of its U.S. Treasuries trading desk, who allegedly made hundreds of illegal trades over a 13-month period.

According to the SEC’s order, between April 2018 and May 2019, the former TD Securities trader spoofed the U.S. Treasury cash securities market by entering orders on one side of the market that he had no intention of executing (herein, non-bona fide orders), so he could obtain more favorable execution prices on bona fide orders he was entering simultaneously on the other side of the market. After the bona fide orders were filled, resulting in profits to TD Securities, the trader allegedly then canceled the non-bona fide orders. The SEC’s order also finds that TD Securities lacked adequate controls and that it failed to take reasonable steps to scrutinize the trader after receiving warnings of his potentially irregular trading activity.

“Manipulative and deceptive trading undermines the integrity of our markets,” said Mark Cave, Associate Director in the SEC’s Division of Enforcement. “Broker-dealers and other firms cannot ignore their employees’ manipulative conduct and must take meaningful steps to detect and prevent it. Today’s action results from our continuing commitment to combating illicit trading.”

TD Securities consented to the entry of the SEC’s order finding that it violated an antifraud provision of the federal securities laws and  failed to reasonably supervise the trader. TD Securities was further ordered to cease and desist from future violations of the relevant antifraud provision, was censured, and was ordered to pay disgorgement of $400,000, prejudgment interest, and a civil penalty of $6.5 million. In a related matter, TD Securities has entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and has agreed to pay a total monetary sanction of more than $15 million as part of that agreement, of which $400,000 will be credited by disgorgement to the SEC. TD Securities has separately agreed to pay a $6 million fine to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) to resolve related charges.

The SEC’s investigation was conducted by Bobby Gray, Edward Patterson, and Devon Staren of the Division of Enforcement, with assistance from Eugene Canjels, Stuart Jackson, Elizabeth Luh, and Raymond Wolff of the Division of Economic and Risk Analysis under the supervision of Sarah Hall and Mr. Cave. The SEC appreciates the assistance of the Fraud Section of DOJ’s Criminal Division and FINRA.

Man Group Gains FX Trading Benefits from Aeron®

Programming code abstract technology background of software developer and Computer script

In today’s electronic FX markets, speed is important. As liquidity can deepen or thin in real time, trade orders must be sent immediately to minimize execution risk.

Man Group, an active investment firm with $178 billion under management, was looking for faster and more reliable technology. Specifically, the global hedge fund wanted more control over its functionality and roadmap, as well as predictable, ultra-low latency even under the highest data loads. This could be achieved, amongst other ways, by building a fully fault-tolerant, low-latency messaging layer.    

By leveraging Aeron’s open source technology, Man Group was able to build this high-performance messaging layer, gaining the following benefits:

  • Improved latency statistics and predictability;
  • Higher resilience to spikes of messages and instant recovery in case of failures;
  • Future-proofing of its FX execution system; and
  • Built-in system resiliency so reporting processes do not interfere with trading.

After a successful rollout, Aeron is in Man Group’s toolkit of approved technologies for projects with low-latency requirements. Man Group’s technology team subsequently integrated Aeron technology into an equities and futures trading platform for communication signals to algo execution engines.

Access the full case study, including architecture and latency profiles, here.

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