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

Virginie’s Blog – Never a Dull Moment

Subscribe to our newsletter

Summer used to be a quiet month or two for news. Not so this year (or even the last few years perhaps). What with the M&A rumour mill on overdrive, restructuring and musical chairs within the vendor community, endless regulatory toing and froing, and the recent announcement that the UK is potentially opting out of Target2-Securities (T2S), it’s been a busy month.

On that last item, although the Bank of England hasn’t confirmed it, there has been a rumour doing the rounds this week that the UK has vetoed joining the European Central Bank’s (ECB) T2S project. The project, which aims to harmonise settlement across Europe, will impact the securities services industry throughout the region and, more importantly for the back office and data crowd, the corporate actions processing function (see more here).

The T2S team has identified standards that must be adopted in the corporate actions function in order to participate in the new settlement system. The responsibility for the adoption of these new corporate actions standards has therefore been laid at the feet of the central securities depositories (CSDs) who will be compelled to adopt them as they sign up to participate in T2S. However, it is not yet certain what the impact will be for countries that opt out (especially when a country so significant in the cross border traffic stakes opts out – the UK represents around 40% of the flow of euro transactions). Will this put the whole project in jeopardy? What happens to the planned adoption of the new corporate actions standards in that case? Not much is certain as yet.

The same can be said of the unsteady sands of regulatory change, with various parts of Dodd Frank evolving and key aspects of European regulation up for debate. How can definitive operations and technology focused projects be planned with any certainty when the goalposts are constantly moving? That’s certainly a common complaint within the data vendor community about the response of the C level to such regulatory uncertainty. Vital data infrastructure projects can easily languor in the mire in such circumstances.

In other news on the uncertainty front, the vendors currently waiting to learn their fate – Thomson Reuters’ Kondor business line, Misys, SmartStream et al – are having a tense summer. Will the FIS bid for Misys go through? Who is bidding for SmartStream and when will the winner be announced? What on earth is going on at Thomson Reuters?

I’m fairly certain that given these uncertainties, the summer will continue to be a hectic one on the news front.

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

Implementing and Understanding Modern Data Architectures: Webinar Preview

The evolution of data use by financial institutions has been accompanied by ever-changing challenges to its management. With technologies such as artificial intelligence enabling firms to prise greater value from their data and to subject it to greater utilisation, a new set of data management practices have emerged. These modern data architectures regard data as...

EVENT

Data Management Summit London

Now in its 16th year, the Data Management Summit (DMS) in London brings together the European capital markets enterprise data management community, to explore how data strategy is evolving to drive business outcomes and speed to market in changing times.

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...