About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

Intelligent Trading Insights and Predictions for 2017

Subscribe to our newsletter

Trading organisations need to turn the manual art of trading operations into the science of automation to reduce costs, deliver the best outcomes for clients and comply with the transparency requirements of Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II (MiFID II). They may also need to reassess business models that are no longer fit for purpose.

These issues and more will be discussed during a keynote panel at next week’s A-Team Group Intelligent Trading Summit in London. The panel – Intelligent Trading Insights and Predictions for 2017 – will be moderated by Andrew Delaney, chief content officer at A-Team, and joined by Chris Donnan, chief technology officer at Tyler Capital; Kenneth McLeish, managing director and global head of trading technology at JP Morgan Asset Management; Kee-Meng Tan, senior advisor and head of execution strategy at BNP Paribas; and Brian Schwieger, co-head of equity, funds, and fixed income secondary markets, and head of equity product at London Stock Exchange Group.

The panel will consider the impact of regulation on trading, advances in technology and the need, at many buy-side and sell-side firms, to overhaul outdated business models and build models that can provide a sustainable future in a highly regulated, volatile, competitive and low margin market.

We spoke to a couple of the panellists before the event to get a sense of market participants’ expectations for the coming year. Donnan expects 2017 to be a year of internal scrutiny as the base cost of trading business is rising, margins are low and firms need to figure out the optimum business model for survival. He comments: “There are challenges for all in this business. I have never before seen so many firms questioning what they must do to survive.”

Donnan also forecasts a year of continuing pressure on firms resulting from regulation, uncertainty caused by world developments such as Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, and increasing regulatory interest in cybersecurity. He also notes the imperative to implement machine learning that will automate trading strategies and perhaps put quants out of a job.

McLeish names the top challenges of 2017 as regulation, particularly MiFID II and the impact it will have on the market, and the need for asset managers to make a seismic shift from passive to active management.

Addressing these challenges, he says: “Asset managers need to be at the front and centre of technological revolution. Many sell-side firms are behind the times. They need to make use of more and better technology to become increasingly systematic and efficient, and to scale up and reduce costs. There are some very sophisticated hedge funds, but also many asset managers that have been doing things manually for a long time. It is time to turn trading operations from art to science and drive automation into the buy-side trading space.”

Join the discussion at A-Team’s Intelligent Trading Summit to find out about:

  • The challenges of 2017
  • Impacts of regulation
  • The drive to automation
  • Coping with uncertainty
  • Optimum business models
Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Recorded Webinar: Unlocking value: Harnessing modern data platforms for data integration, advanced investment analytics, visualisation and reporting

Modern data platforms are bringing efficiencies, scalability and powerful new capabilities to institutions and their data pipelines. They are enabling the use of new automation and analytical technologies that are also helping firms to derive more value from their data and reduce costs. Use cases of specific importance to the finance sector, such as data...

BLOG

Don’t Forget People and Process when Deploying Agentic AI

When the financial industry talks ‘agentic AI’, there’s a tendency for the conversation to quickly devolve into cutting-edge technologies – large language models (LLMs), neural networks, generative algorithms (GenAI) etc. Agentic AI is really about transforming the business processes that define firms’ operations and the roles that supervise them. Success is dependent on more than...

EVENT

TradingTech Briefing New York

Our TradingTech Briefing in New York is aimed at senior-level decision makers in trading technology, electronic execution, trading architecture and offers a day packed with insight from practitioners and from innovative suppliers happy to share their experiences in dealing with the enterprise challenges facing our marketplace.

GUIDE

The DORA Implementation Playbook: A Practitioner’s Guide to Demonstrating Resilience Beyond the Deadline

The Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) has fundamentally reshaped the European Union’s financial regulatory landscape, with its full application beginning on January 17, 2025. This regulation goes beyond traditional risk management, explicitly acknowledging that digital incidents can threaten the stability of the entire financial system. As the deadline has passed, the focus is now shifting...