A-Team Insight White Paper
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...
Alternative Data: Application and Best Practices for Investment Management Firms
Listen to the related webinar here. Knowledge is money in capital markets and alternative data is fast becoming part of that knowledge, but it is not always easy to source, evaluate, integrate and use to best effect. The data may be incomplete, unstructured, include data that isn’t permitted for redistribution under privacy laws, and have...
Solving the KYC & AML Challenge for Cryptocurrencies, Tokens & ICOs
The cryptocurrency market is at an inflection point. It has gained substantial momentum from early investors (private & retail), day traders and prop shops but it has so far failed to get substantive engagement from wider institutional players. The crypto marketplace today is a mix of exchange and OTC-traded activity with little of the market...
Getting eComms Surveillance Right
Demand for electronic communications (eComms) surveillance has risen in response to regulatory requirements and compliance needs to pinpoint problems such as market abuse without wasting time and resources reviewing false positives. Innovative technologies such as machine learning, natural language understanding (NLU) and other strands of artificial intelligence (AI) are improving financial services firms’ ability to...
Quantity vs. Quality: An Evolving Research Paradigm
A revolution is under way in how buy-side firms conceptualize value in the research they consume. However, sell-side houses may be behind the curve in recognizing this. Driving this change in perception among buy-side firms is the EU’s Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II (MiFID II). Under MiFID II, buy-side firms have to pay for...
The Signal and the Noise: Changing the Approach to Investment Data
Today there is significant pressure on active management funds to generate returns that are better than the passive funds that they compete against. As a result, investment managers are constantly seeking new ways to generate investment edge. This has happened in an environment where the volume and velocity of investment data available continues to accelerate....