A-Team Insight White Paper
Financial Markets Operations Response to COVID-19: Best Practices for Working from Home
The COVID-19 pandemic is disrupting all walks of life, and carries with it implications for society beyond even the obvious and immediate health impact. Business is being hit across the board, with many corporations sending staff home in an effort to keep them both safe and working. It’s clear that firms can’t rely on a...
The Current State of Buy-Side Enterprise Data Management
The advent of enterprise data management (EDM) held up the promise of more streamlined operations, improved cost efficiencies and a tighter rein on data access. But after a decade spent trying to implement EDM, few investment managers feel they are getting the control, quality or insights they were expecting. According to an A-Team survey of...
A Holistic View of Risk Across the Enterprise: How Data Linkages Help
Gaining a comprehensive view of their risk exposures has long been a challenge for financial institutions. Standard measures have been embraced to measure and manage market risk, and the emergence of a standard legal entity identifier in the form of the LEI has gone some way toward addressing the issues of counterparty and credit risk...
Contractual Rights Management: It’s Time to Take Control of Data Usage
Contractual rights management has become a hot topic in financial information and market data circles following a number of public instances involving high-profile financial institutions breaching licensing agreements with data vendors – and paying the price with both significant financial penalties and damaged reputations. A potential solution for contractual rights management is the emerging Open...
Adopting AI for Superior Reconciliations
Firms’ reconciliation and exceptions management processes are manually intensive, expensive and prone to error. With rising compliance costs and greater competition narrowing margins in financial services, firms are looking to streamline their reconciliations processes through automation, giving them the opportunity to reduce the number of exceptions they manage and the time it takes to deal...
Addressing the Reference Data Challenges of SFTR
The EU’s Securities Financing Transactions Regulation (SFTR), which comes into effect in April 2020, is a data-heavy transaction reporting regulation along the lines of MiFIR and EMIR, but has a significant reference data element as well. The regulation is extensive, with some 150 data fields in its mandatory regulatory reports, a dozen of which will...
How to Exploit the Opportunities of Alternative Data
Alternative data is moving into the mainstream, driven by trading desks looking for alpha and more recently by private equity firms and corporate intelligence teams looking to gain market insight. That said, while adoption is increasing and some benefits are being realised, the data does come with caveats including incomplete datasets, poor quality, limited volume,...
Data as the Catalyst for Innovation in Asset and Wealth Management
Fund managers and wealth management firms are being squeezed between downward pressures on sources of revenues and upward pressures on costs. Firms are facing a migration to passive investment funds, with some research suggesting a one-third drop in active management fees by 2023. Meanwhile, the ongoing regulatory onslaught is adding to costs. Under pressure to...
Trade Surveillance and Mobile Recording in the Era of Data Privacy
The EU’s MiFID II and other regulations globally have placed greater emphasis than ever on market surveillance, recording of trading communications and records-retention processes in an attempt to stamp out market abuse and boost investor confidence and protections. At the same time, the public’s attitude toward data privacy has hardened, most visibly through new regulations...
Delivering Algo Performance through Enhanced Market Simulation
The global shift toward unbundling of research services from execution is forcing sell-side institutions to focus on differentiating their service offerings as they vie for buy-side liquidity in an increasingly competitive marketplace. With soft-commissioned research and high-speed connectivity to trading venues no longer potent as differentiators, the sell side is acknowledging that the quality and...