Tag Archives: tech talk

Tech Talk

Rupert Murdoch Takes On Bloomberg-Symphony Sings

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BrokerDealer-Banked Chat Service Symphony Signs Pact to Sing News from Dow Jones and WSJ

MarketsMuse Fintech editors are observing Rosh Hashana today, and we thank our friends at BrokerDealer.com blog for the following story..which could set the tone for a slug fest between Rupert Murdoch of News Corp. and Michael Bloomberg, the iconic founder of Bloomberg LP and 3-time major of New York City.

With merely a few days in advance of its launch, Symphony Communications, the instant-message platform backed by a consortium of Wall Street’s biggest brokerdealers and whose strategy is to undercut the seemingly irreplaceable Bloomberg-powered IM, announced that it has inked a deal with Dow Jones & Co to feed streaming News Corp.-owned Dow Jones News and Wall Street Journal content into the Bloomberg-killer service.

BrokerDealer.com is the host to the financial industry’s most comprehensive database of broker-dealers and provides information on brokerdealers across more than 30 countries worldwide.

According to the latest WSJ coverage, Symphony has won backing on Wall Street because it has been viewed as a potential lower cost alternative to a popular messaging service on Bloomberg LP’s terminals. The company has also made its encryption technology a key selling point for financial firms wary about sensitive data falling into the wrong hands.

The Palo Alto, Calif., company has secured $66 million in financing from 14 firms including Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and BlackRock Inc.

People Profiles, Tech Talk

Buyside Block Trading Venue Luminex Readies Launch

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As if there were not enough electronic trading platforms,  the buyside remains determined to have their own equities trading platform open only to buy-side block trading peers. MarketsMuse Tech Talk Editors tip our hats to FierceFinanceIT.com  for the following update re  Luminex Trading & Analytics, the ATS block trading venue backed by a consortium of large asset managers, which recently announced an updated management team in preparation for the venue’s Q4 launch.

The new management team in place is led by Jonathan Clark, former managing director and head of U.S. equities trading a BlackRock, who will serve as Luminex Trading’s CEO. Clark replaces interim CEO Michael Cashel, who will return to his position as SVP of Fidelity Trading Ventures. Plans for Clark to take over as permanent CEO were previously announced, and as of Tuesday he has officially begun the role.

Plans to build the Luminex Trading venue, which is backed by nine leading investment managers that collectively manage approximately 40 percent of U.S. fund assets, were first announced in January.

The venue will be a buy-side only block trading platform “open to any investment manager primarily focused on the long term and with the desire to trade large blocks of stock with other investment managers,” according to an earlier announcement from the company. The nine investment managers in the consortium backing Luminex are BNY Mellon, BlackRock, Capital Group, Fidelity Investments, Invesco, JPMorgan Asset Management, MFS Investment Management, State Street Global Advisors and T. Rowe Price.

David Hagen, Luminex
David Hagen, Luminex

Luminex Trading announced four other members of the management team this week. Brian Williamson will be head of sales, tasked with further building the client base. Williamson was previously senior global relationship manager with Liquidnet. James Dolan is chief compliance officer, joining the company from Fidelity, where he was previously vice president of compliance for Fidelity Institutional. David Hagen will head product development as Luminex Trading’s new head of product. He was previously director at Pico Quantitative Trading. David Consigli is the company’s new controller, joining from IDB Bank.

Luminex says its platform will offer investment managers lower-cost and more efficient block trading, with transparent trading rules and protocols.

Tech Talk

FINtech is On Fire: 3-Fold Jump In Deals Funded

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As reported by FINalternatives.com and extract below, MarketsMuse tech talk editors note that investments in financial technology (FINtech) deals nearly tripled in the United States in 2014, according to a new report by Accenture and the Partnership Fund for New York City.

The value of fintech investments in the United States soared to $9.89 billion in 2014, up from $3.39 billion in 2013.

This 191% increase dwarfs the increase in 2013, when fintech deal values in the United States climbed 68%. In New York, fintech deal values grew by 32% in 2014, to a new high of $768 million.

The report, Fintech New York: Partnerships, Platforms and Open Innovation was released Thursday at the FinTech Innovation Lab’s fifth annual Demo Day event in New York.

According to the report, global fintech investment tripled in 2014, to $12.2 billion, from $4.05 billion in 2013. By comparison, the overall market for venture-capital investing increased only 63% during that period.

“This past year marked a paradigm shift in how financial services companies approach and embrace fintech innovation, as they recognize the vast potential that this strong network provides,” said Robert Gach, managing director of Accenture Strategy Capital Markets. “An increasing number of banks and insurers are investing in connecting into the fintech ecosystem, whether through accelerator or incubator labs, venture investments or in other ways. We believe this explosive growth in fintech will help drive innovation within some of the world’s largest financial institutions.”

Where the Money is Going  Continue reading →

Fixed Income, Tech Talk

Finra, Fixed Income and FinTech—Fixing What Folks Keep Saying is Broken

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MarketsMuse blog update profiles a proposal from FINRA which proposes pre-trade transparency for fixed income automatic trading systems operators. This update is courtesy of  Traders Magazines’ article, “A Step Closer to a Fixed-Income NBBO” with an excerpt from the article below.

A modest proposal made by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) aims to have fixed-income alternative trading system (ATS) operators to submit a weekly report that contains all of their quotation data for TRACE-eligible corporate and agency debt-securities to the regulator.

Such data would help FINRA better surveil the growing electronic fixed-income market, especially retail trades, according Robert Colby, the chief legal officer at FINRA.

“We would love to have this information,” he said when speaking the Investment Company Institute’s capital markets conference. “We do not get them now, so we are not super familiar with it. We’ve gotten it in batches at times but are not familiar with it enough to know how to work it into our surveillance system, which is our primary line of interest.”

FINRA officials declined to comment on the proposal further citing that it was still out for comment at press time.

According to the proposal’s text, FINRA would not disseminate the ATS-provided data publicly and use it solely for regulatory and surveillance purposes. However the text also states that FINRA may analyze the data for “the potential value and feasibility of public dissemination in the future.”

To read the entire article from Traders Magazine, click here.