The British decision to withdraw from the EU represents the most significant shift in UK politics in a half-century. Although the terms for a successful withdrawal are not yet finalised, the British government’s current approach does not include an equivalent customs partnership with the EU.
The growing use of algorithms to automate trading activities is garnering increasing regulatory attention, which highlights the need for dedicated risk management processes and systems.
Trade surveillance encapsulates the processes and procedures that help financial institutions detect and prevent trading rule violations. While various regulations push for increased scrutiny and security, MAR and MiFID II notably have far-reaching implications for trade behavior, post-trade surveillance and pre-trade risk controls checks.
Few banks today develop truly differentiated technology, having moved from being ’technology makers’ to ‘technology takers’. The development of proprietary software has taken a back seat, and is now only considered in situations where creating a competitive advantage or controlling sensitive data is of paramount importance.
One of the most difficult challenges companies face today is how to be more flexible and adaptive in a dynamic business environment. ‘Speed to market’ demands identifying and capitalizing on opportunities as soon as they appear and has become a major driver for the adoption of DevOps in the financial market industry. These changes have paved the way for new design approaches such as Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) based on automated configuration and provisioning.
Under MIFID II, asset managers were free to use different methods for calculating transaction costs – either by interpreting the MIFID II requirements themselves or, as most firms have done, by leveraging PRIIPS methodology.
Following the 2008 global financial crisis and recent malpractice scandals, institutions across the financial services industry have started taking proactive measures to protect themselves from market and operational risks by improving their surveillance capabilities.
2017 has been an exciting time for GreySpark due to the growth of our two new offices in New York and Edinburgh. Edinburgh has done extremely well, hiring three new consultants over the summer period. New York has also made some great progress and we have built a great pipe of consultants who are ready to go in 2018.