Investment banks are agreed that they have to do something about trade reconstruction – but where do you start?

Modern scandals in financial services revolve around recorded data because, to misquote Fox Mulder, the truth is in there. When the recording medium is magnetic tape, however, the task of unearthing that truth can be Herculean in scale.

Some companies talk about corporate social responsibility when referring to initiatives which are completely unrelated to core business activity. This doesn’t mean an initiative is bad but it may be a superficial “papering over the cracks” exercise that is far outweighed by the negative impact of a firm’s day to day operations.

Volatility and uncertainty drive profit generation in some capital markets. The same cannot be said when investing in trading infrastructure. It is shrewder to take an informed, incremental approach to your technology decisions or you may be seeing red 12 months down the line.

I have a very simple philosophy on projects: There are good projects and bad projects. Everyone looks good on good projects and on bad projects everyone looks bad. Throughout my career I have encountered situations where something has gone wrong and people revert to the ‘but it wasn’t my fault’ response. Those of you who […]

  This blog should be a retrospective. Sadly it’s not. The exemption on mobile voice recording in FSA regulation PS10/17 was lifted in November but the surrounding issues are not resolved. Some institutions have achieved compliance but that is not enough. We discussed this topic in May when Marc Henson explained that the key discovery […]

  Due diligence is a hot topic in hedge fund management. The process is becoming increasingly demanding and can last as long as six months. That’s a lot of valuable time to have invested in non-core activity if it comes to nothing. There is no requirement for the potential investor to inform the hedge fund manager […]