Appital Appoints New Non-Exec Directors

Equity capital marketplace Appital has appointed Greg Bennett and Stephane Carty as non-executive directors, following the recent appointment of Brian Guckian and Philipp Eberle to the firm’s management team. Bennett, previously Head of Capital Markets for EMEA and the Americas for Fidelity International, also brings sell side expertise as former Partner and Managing Director in Equity Capital Markets and Equity Syndicate for Cazenove and JPMorgan Cazenove. Carty founded Fir Post Capital, a global volatility fund, in 2010 and subsequently Blackheath Capital Management. Previously, he was head of European Principal Strategies at Wachovia Securities International.

Beeks Appoints Matthew Cretney as Head of Product Management

Beeks Financial Cloud and Velocimetrics have appointed Matthew Cretney as the head of product management. Cretney is an experienced technologist with decades of working in FinTech and infrastructure, with most of those years spent with Reuters/Refinitiv. At Thomson Reuters he was the technical product lead for Refinitiv’s SaaS multi-tenant white-labelled FX eTrading capability and oversaw the development of Refinitiv’s FX Spot and Forwards Matching services.

“With the ongoing investment in the Velocimetrics product set, Beeks and Velocimetrics are demonstrating a better, faster, cheaper answer to an increasingly complex set of requirements and I want to be part of that new future,” says Cretney.

Asset Control Targets Buy Side with Nielen Hire

Asset Control’s appointment of industry veteran Stef Nielen is part of a renewed focus on the buy side, following a number of contract wins in that segment. Nielen, who joins director, strategic development, hails from Axioma, where he was sales director, and has held sales-oriented roles with MSCI and RiskMetrics, among other buy-side oriented suppliers.

According to Martijn Groot, vice president of marketing and strategy at Asset Control, the company has chalked up a number of fund and wealth management contract deals this year, and is seeing significant interest in its AC Pass hosted service.

Groot says Nielen’s hire formalizes a strategic direction that was already under way. The AC Pass service – which supports a range of hosted capabilities – was developed with the buy side specifically in mind. Groot says Asset Control has now bedded down its relationship with a range of cloud providers, allowing it to offer varying hosting and service levels, using third-party professional services group eClerx to handle outsourced data management functions where required.

Nielen was most recently sales director at risk and analytics specialist Axioma Inc., which is now part of Deutsche Boerse’s Qontigo group. Before that he spent eight years at MSCI focusing on buy-side engagements. Asset Control says his appointment will allow the company “to more specifically focus on the requirements of its buy-side customers around self-controlled data sourcing, mastering, derivation and integration across the investment decision processes.”

With its recent new buy-side signings, the company says it “continues to see high levels of engagement from asset managers, hedge funds and institutional investors” driven by “industry developments around increasing data diversity, volumes and controls on data consumption; onboarding of alternative data sets; and increased use of ESG data, self-indexing and more granular reporting.”

In a separate development, Asset Control has teamed up with European consulting firm d-fine “to deliver enhanced data management, analytics and mastering to business users by integrating d-fine’s quantitative analytics (quant) capabilities with Asset Control’s new market data warehouse.”

Asset Control’s data warehouse enables a two-stage data management process and separate production mastering process, which is complemented by d-fine’s business expertise and quantitative modelling to help clients create market data infrastructures that combine modern data management technology with powerful data access and analytics.

This capability is exemplified by advanced curve and vole cube building capabilities, powered by d-fine’s pricing library Mosco, which facilitate a deeper integration of valuation and market data functions.

According to Asset Control, the new initiative seeks to address users’ growing demand for high-quality market data combined with precise and extensive meta-data for data-driven financial modelling in pricing, hedging, market analysis, risk and finance, as well as regulators’ and auditors’ growing need to scrutinize data preparation processes, data lineage and governance.

Neil Sandle, head of product management at Asset Control, says d-fine’s expertise in financial analytics and business expertise complements Asset Control’s Ops360 end-to-end mastering platform, its data lineage capability and its ACX market data warehouse solution, to provide analytics and derived pricing capabilities.

GLEIF Announces New Chairperson to Support Banking Collaboration

The Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF) has appointed Steven A. Joachim as the new Chairperson. Based in the US, Joachim holds over 40 years of leadership experience across not-for-profit, governmental and corporate organisations, with a specific focus on financial technology and innovation. He joins GLEIF from the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), where he was Executive Vice President of Transparency Services.

Wolters Kluwer Finance, Risk & Reporting Hires Co-Head of Sales & Account Management for APAC

Wolters Kluwer’s Finance, Risk & Reporting (FRR) business has hired Mourid Nasri as Co-Head of Sales & Account Management for the Asia Pacific (APAC) region, based in Singapore. Nasri joins Wolters Kluwer from Moody’s Analytics where he was Senior Sales Director for South East Asia. During his 10 years with Moody’s Nasri worked across a wide range of risk management and risk advisory disciplines, based in Hong Kong, Singapore, Germany and the UK. He also worked at Deutsche Bank in equity derivatives trading.

In his new position at Wolters Kluwer FRR Nasri will report directly to Rainer Fuchsluger, Managing Director for APAC, and work closely with Tat Wee Koh, Co-Head of Sales & Account Management for APAC. He will lead a regional team of sales professionals and account managers.

BSO Appoints Anna Flach as Global Marketing Director

Telecoms operator and infrastructure provider BSO has appointed Anna Flach as Global Marketing Director. As a member of the management team, she will be responsible for defining and executing BSO’s marketing and communications strategy, based in London and reporting to Chief Commercial Officer Fraser Bell. Flach joins BSO from the world of FinTech, where she was most recently working towards mainstream adoption of blockchain technology. Prior to that, Anna held roles at Commerzbank, BNP Paribas and Allianz in Munich, Paris and London.

Gresham Appoints Marc Binck as Head of Cloud Services

Gresham Technologies (Gresham), has appointed Marc Binck as Head of Cloud Services to accelerate the firm’s cloud strategy across global markets. Previously Director of Operations, Cash Management, Marc has been instrumental in developing Clareti’s multi-banking connectivity arm over the last two years. In his new role, Binck will be responsible for the continuous delivery and integration of cloud services across the entire Clareti platform of data reconciliation, cash management and payments solutions.

The announcement comes off the back of a tier one bank contract win for the firm and successful FY2019 results, in which it reported a 30% increase in Group revenues to £25m and twelve new Clareti wins in 2019.

Torstone Technology Appoints David Pearson to Product Team

Torstone Technology, a provider of post-trade securities and derivatives processing, today announced the appointment of David Pearson, who will be joining Torstone’s product team, based at the firm’s London headquarters.  He joins Torstone from Genesis Global, where he was responsible for post-trade workflow solutions. Prior to that, Pearson spent twenty-five years at Fidessa, initially working with sell-side brokers and dealers to build and implement front and middle-office workflow solutions for equities, and more recently, with buy-side firms on asset classes including exchange-traded derivatives and repo. He is a former Co-chair of the FIX Trading Community’s Global Post Trade Working Group.

Tourmaline Receives Investment, Hires New Executives

Tourmaline Partners, a global outsourced trading solutions firms, has received a majority investment from Copley Equity Partners, a private investment firm that focuses on established businesses with significant growth prospects. Terms of the deal are not being disclosed, but Tourmaline is projected to trade $300 billion notionally in equities in 2020, in a notable validation of the outsourced/supplemental trading model. Following the deal, the firm hired Alex Goodman (formerly at Macquarie) and Matt Sindell (formerly at Susquehanna International Group) as Managing Directors, and Darren Mazzuca (formerly at Gabelli Asset Management) as Director of Operations.

Point Nine Expands to Luxembourg with Paul Goes

Point Nine, a post-trade processing and regulatory reporting service provider, is expanding its global presence by forming a team in Luxembourg. The team will be headed by Paul Goes as its Business Development Manager, based in Luxembourg since April 2020. Andreas Roussos, Point Nine Director, says, “We’re excited Paul Goes has joined our team and are confident his extensive experience in the Luxembourg Financial Services marketplace will contribute to Point Nine’s expansion as well as providing the market with an excellent cloud-based reporting suite of products.”