About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

With First CFTC Limits Deadline Past, FundApps Urges Firms to Plan for Next Wave

Subscribe to our newsletter

Practitioners reported general readiness for the introduction last week of new CFTC rules around position limits, a decade after the regulator first floated its plans for changing them. Regulated firms are now being urged to prepare for further changes scheduled for next year, which will introduce new exchange rules and federal limits on derivatives contracts not previously subject to them.

The long-awaited CFTC rule changes came into effect on March 15. The Final Rule, published in the Federal Register in January, aims to dispel uncertainty among market participants by clarifying CFTC’s position limits on a slew of legacy agricultural contracts. The new rules increase the limit size on a series of agricultural commodity contracts, presenting affected firms with the opportunity to increase their volumes in these securities.

“But what is crucial is that firms avoid any further delay in preparing for new rules for exchange limits and those contracts not previously subject to federal limits coming into effect on January, 2022,” says Andrew White, CEO at FundApps, which helps firms manage their position limits.

According to Nick Krzywkowski, Business Development at FundApps, this next phase will introduce CFTC position limits to another set of commodities products in the energy and metals segments for the first time. In particular, widely traded contracts that will be impacted include NYMEX Henry Hub Natural Gas for the former and COMEX Gold and Silver contracts for the latter.. As a result of these changes at the federal level, Krzywkowski says, exchanges will have to review and possibly amend their own limits. Additionally, by 2023, the CFTC wants to start introducing position limits on economically equivalent swaps.

All this regulatory activity, White says, means there is “a significant body of work to do from a legal, operational, and compliance perspective in order for firms to be ready for limit changes as well as including OTC derivatives in their calculations required by the CFTC from 1st Jan 2023.” Those that don’t have the right processes in place to keep abreast of position limits expose themselves to significant financial and reputational risk, in an area of compliance where economic sanctions are high and, amidst the backdrop of an ever-competitive business landscape, compliance infractions can put firms at a disadvantage to their competitors, he says.

Adds Krzywkowski: “Firms often perform this function on a manual basis, say via quarterly audit, where limits stored by companies internally, for example in excel spreadsheets, are updated in respect of changes made by exchanges and regulators. This can be risky, especially if limits go down and firms are caught short and breach them. Firms trading derivatives contracts will have to build monitoring tools to deal with these and future updates. On top of this, there is a significant burden of work for exchanges to carry out in setting up processes to capture relevant OTC trading in order to satisfy the CFTC’s requirements set out in the Final Rule.” FundApps helps firms to get away from manual processes, he says, promoting operational efficiency as well as compliance.

FundApps launched in 2010 as a compliance-as-a-service provider. The company has three main areas of focus: shareholding disclosure for financial institutions that are required to disclose their equity ownership stakes for transparency purposes; sensitive industries, for sectors which are deemed to be ‘sensitive’ by governments and where restrictions on equity ownership have been established; and position limit monitoring, which assists firms with monitoring their derivative exposures across asset classes, versus limits set out by exchanges and regulators around the globe.

In this latter segment, FundApps helps firms monitor and prepare for the sometimes frequent changes in position limits issued by exchanges or by regulators like CFTC or ESMA. FundApps receives updates on limits from FIA Tech, the data arm of the Futures Industry Association (FIA), and through their team of software engineers and regulatory experts, they normalise the data, interpret monitoring instructions into algorithmic code, add relevant calendar information and then map these to client firms’ position information, which is uploaded to FundApp’s AWS instance. Results are then delivered to the client either via user interface, email snapshot, or for those that would like another layer of automation, via an outbound API, which can be used by clients in a number of ways, including direct connection to trading systems.

Users of the service are able to check whether they are close to breaching a trading limit, and inform traders or desk heads as appropriate. API users can connect the services directly to analytical applications like Tableau to create dashboards for monitoring during the trading day, or else connect directly with their traders’ order management systems (OMSs), portfolio management systems (PMSs) and other systems. “Many of our clients use our services in collaboration with a number of companies,” Krzywkowski says, “including: Bloomberg, Refinitiv, FactSet, SimCorp, Enfusion, Eze Software, Broadridge, Asset Control, Markit EDM, HedgeServ, Northern Trust and GoldenSource.”

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Recorded Webinar: How to automate entity data management and due diligence to ensure efficiency, accuracy and compliance

Requesting, gathering, analysing and monitoring customer, vendor and partner entity data is time consuming, and often a tedious manual process. This can slow down customer relationships and expose financial institutions to risk from inaccurate, incomplete or outdated data – but there are solutions to these problems. This webinar will consider the challenges of sourcing and...

BLOG

GoldenSource Releases Market Risk Factor Data Standard, Eases FRTB Compliance

GoldenSource, a provider of Enterprise Data Management (EDM) and Master Data Management (MDM) solutions, has created a market risk factor data standard. Called Curve Master Definitions, the standard seeks to provide investment banks with a single risk factor taxonomy for market rates required to price OTC derivatives, including the storage and aggregation of industry standard...

EVENT

Data Management Summit London

Now in its 14th year, the Data Management Summit (DMS) in London brings together the European capital markets enterprise data management community, to explore how data strategy is evolving to drive business outcomes and speed to market in changing times.

GUIDE

Regulatory Data Handbook 2023 – Eleventh Edition

Welcome to the eleventh edition of A-Team Group’s Regulatory Data Handbook, a popular publication that covers new regulations in capital markets, tracks regulatory change, and provides advice on the data, data management and implementation requirements of more than 30 regulations across UK, European, US and Asia-Pacific capital markets. This edition of the handbook includes new...