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.

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.

André Helfenstein Joins the Board of Directors of SIX

Shareholders at SIX’s AGM yesterday elected André Helfenstein to the Board of Directors. He becomes the representative of Credit Suisse with immediate effect, replacing Thomas Gottstein. The 53-year-old Swiss and British citizen is CEO of Credit Suisse (Switzerland) and a member of the Executive Board of Credit Suisse Group, responsible for the bank’s entire Swiss business. He has been with the bank for over 12 years, holding various management positions in different areas of the private clients business as well as in the corporate and institutional clients business. Before joining Credit Suisse he spent over 10 years with Boston Consulting Group. He is also a member of the Boards of Directors of Neue Aargauer Bank and Venture Incubator.

Warren Barkley Joins Clearwater as CTO

Clearwater Analytics, an SaaS solution for investment data aggregation, reconciliation, accounting, and reporting, has appointed Warren Barkley as Chief Technology Officer. Barkley was formerly General Manager in the AWS Machine Learning Group at Amazon and has held roles at Microsoft and SMART Technologies, as well as holding over 60 worldwide patents in networking, wireless, communications, and machine learning and playing an active role in the VC community. He is expected to bring his expertise in delivering cloud computing solutions to the business world to his role at Clearwater.

Asset Control Appoints Daniel Kennedy to Drive APAC Sales

Cloud-based data management specialist Asset Control has hired Daniel Kennedy as its new Head of Sales for Asia Pacific, based in Singapore and reporting to Head of International Sales Gary Appleby. Kennedy will be responsible for leading the firm’s sales team in the region. He joins from banking software provider FIS, where he acted as VP and Head of Sales, also based in Singapore, leading the commercial team responsible for both buy- and sell-side solutions across Southeast Asia and Australia.

Neudata Opens Shanghai Office, Hires China-Focused Data Strategist

After seeing an increase in demand for data scouting services in Asia, London-based independent data sourcing and research service Neudata announced today that it has opened an office in Shanghai and hired Helena Yu to manage its client data requests in the region. The Neudata Scout platform captures over 3,500 datasets across sentiment, social media, weather, web-tracking, transactional, ESG and more, with analysts based in New York, London and Shanghai. Yu, who joins Neudata as a data strategist, has spent 10 years working with alternative data sources for the financial services community. Most recently, she was the associate director of sales operations for UBS Evidence Lab, where she drove the rapid growth of the firm’s data research products in the Asia-Pacific region.

Brett Schechterman Leaves Rimes for IHS Markit

IHS Markit has hired asset management technology expert Brett Schechterman as the Global Head of cross-asset class investment management platform thinkFolio. Schechterman will report to Senior Vice President and Head of Solutions Andrew Eisen. He was formerly Head of Fixed Income Platform Solutions at UBS Asset Management and has also held senior roles at Legal & General Investment Management America and Goldman Sachs Asset Management. He joins He joined IHS Markit from Rimes, where he was North American Head of Product.

Syniti Appoints Jules Beck as President Europe & Africa; Clive Bellmore as Chairman

Syniti, a global data solution provider, has named industry and region veteran Jules Beck as President for its Europe & Africa (EUAF) region, succeeding Clive Bellmore, who will assume the post of Chairman for Syniti EUAF. A known leader in the industry, Beck has led rapid growth of several software and services businesses, including Axon Solutions (acquired by HCL Technologies), HP Enterprise Global SAP business (merged with CSC to form DXC Technologies), and most recently ServiceNOW where he served as VP & GM, Customer Outcomes and Professional Services in EMEA.