A-Team Insight White Paper
Only Reason for Time
According to Albert Einstein “…is so that everything doesn’t happen at once”. Consider yourself in the shoes of a timekeeper of athletic events. The stakes are high, consequently the choice of tools for the job imperative. Endurance or sprint? This question is at the forefront when it comes to providing the appropriate accuracy and granularity...
Navigating BCBS 239 and the New Stress-Testing Regime
Rigorous stress testing – and emerging regulations like Basel’s BCBS 239 – mean that the risk and finance functions can no longer act in isolation. Regulators are increasingly seeking a true, holistic view of risk. To deliver on the new requirement, banks need to reinvent their infrastructures and operating models, making sure all elements of...
Tracking bonds for Solvency II’s Matching Adjustment
How are you tracking bonds that are eligible for Solvency II’s Matching Adjustment (MA)? With the January 2016 deadline looming, insurance companies and the asset managers that service them need to be able to identify eligible assets in their portfolio. But there’s no single list, rather a set of criteria to be followed, resulting in...
Predictive Power of Acuity Trading’s Sentiment Indicators
Undertaken by research partner Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, and led by Professor Argimiro Arratia, author of Computational Finance: An Introductory Course with R, this research was conducted on Acuity’s eleven news – based public sentiment indices to identify which sentiment indicator or combination of indicators provided the most reliable forecast. This research was commissioned to provide tangible...
A Utility Approach for Operational Process Improvement
Data management is a high-cost, no-margin activity for financial institutions across the board. Business requirements and regulatory pressure demand more depth of processing and breadth of reporting than ever before. At the same time, high quality data sourcing, validation and enrichment are essential to achieving operational optimization. Yet most firms are reluctant to increase investment...
MiFID II: Practical Considerations for Gainful Compliance
The EU’s Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID) II – which applies from January 2018 – aims to extend the market transparency introduced by its predecessor regulation to new areas of the marketplace. In many cases, MiFID II will be more granular, more prescriptive and more onerous than MiFID I, raising business and technology challenges...
Trade Europe Now
This paper has been written to provide a guide to effective electronic trading in Europe. It offers an overview of current state of play in the European market as well as dispelling myths surrounding MIFID II. It examines what elements are needed to effectively trade Europe, specifically looking at selecting the right physical point of...
Getting to Grips with the Challenge of Beneficial Ownership
Understanding beneficial ownership of an entity – a corporation or a fund – has emerged as a key element of many financial institutions’ compliance activities. A raft of relatively new regulations – ranging from the US Dodd-Frank Act through to Russian sanctions – require firms to understand who owns the entities they do business with,...
Solvency II How Insurers, Asset Managers and Asset Servicers are Meeting the Data Challenge
The EU’s Solvency II regulation is due to come into effect in January 2016. Aimed at ensuring the insurance industry fully understands the risks associated with its investments, the regulation places great emphasis on access to highly granular valuations and risk information. For most insurers, this is the first time they have been required to...
BCBS 239: An Urgent Call to Overhaul Risk Data Management
BCBS 239 is a wide ranging regulation including 14 principles spanning risk data aggregation and reporting, IT infrastructure, and data governance. Implementation can provide significant business benefits, including an enterprise-wide view of risk, but the task is not without difficulties as banks face data management challenges such as data silos, legacy systems and poor data...