JPMorgan Chase is launching a digital bank to offer consumer banking services in the U.K. for the first time. The new bank will bear the Chase brand and will be based in London’s Canary Wharf financial district, as well as operating a customer contact center in Edinburgh, JPMorgan said. The digital bank has already hired 400 people in the U.K. and plans to add more as it grows, the company said. The digital bank is currently being tested internally with JPMorgan employees ahead of a public launch later this year. It will start by offering current accounts and then offer a broader range...

Intercontinental Exchange, Inc., and ADP, a global technology company providing human capital management (HCM) solutions, announced plans to launch a new alternative data offering for the U.S. municipal bond market. This first joint offering leverages ICE Data Services’ background in turning unstructured data into actionable insights and ADP’s expertise with workforce data. Initially, this data will be available through the Snowflake Data Marketplace and directly from ICE Data Services. The U.S. municipal bond market is broad with approximately one million individual bonds from 60 thousand...

Citi has rolled out a new trading platform with a suite of execution algorithms for futures markets across all major exchanges in the US, Europe, and Asia Pacific. The new platform includes benchmark algos such as time-weighted average price (TWAP), volume-weighted average price (VWAP) and Close, as well as other strategies and smart order types. Its flagship algorithm is an implementation shortfall strategy, known as Arrival, which Citi said has been engineered from scratch on the platform. The bank added that Arrival was designed to minimize slippage by reducing the cost trade-off between...

Algorithmic trading technology provider, Pragma, has launched a set of execution algorithms that use AI deep-learning technology following a beta trial last year. The program was initiated by Pragma in 2018 to explore whether deep neural networks could govern routing, sizing, pricing and timing of orders within an execution algorithm’s micro-trading engine. The firm launched a beta trial of the algorithms in 2020 which found that execution quality had been improved by 33% across “billions of traded shares”, according to a story in The Trade news. “The benefit of AI models is that it allows...

FIF CAT Tech Specs Working Group. The CAT Tech Specs Working Group discussed comments and questions for FINRA CAT relating to multi-leg scenarios, reporting of events that occur the evening prior to delisting of a symbol, Net Asset Value workflow, buy-in as agent, and the new numberOfLegs field. The Working Group completed its review and discussion of the FINRA CAT January 8 updates to Phase 2c Reporting Scenarios. The Working Group discussed issues raised by FIF members relating to the ability to report allocation amendments that do not change CAT reportable attributes and false positive...

FIF Front Office Committee. On January 26 at 11am ET, Ari Burstein, President of Capital Markets Strategies, and Greg Mesack, Government Affairs Consultant at Gray Robinson, will present to the Front Office Committee on the recent and upcoming changes in Congress and the SEC and how that could impact broker-dealers, exchanges and other industry participants. FIF Data and Technology Working Group. On January 27 at 10am ET, Jason Murphy from Exegy will discuss the impact of Tesla joining the S&P 500. In addition to this spotlight presentation, the group will cover the monthly Market...

On January 19,  FIF submitted responses to FINRA CAT relating to the order receipt and acceptance process. On January 20 FIF submitted comments to FINRA CAT relating to the CAIS Customer and Account Types proposed by the Plan Participants and separately submitted new and open items to FINRA CAT relating to CAIS. On January 22, FIF submitted additional comments and questions to FINRA CAT based on issues raised by FIF Members.

On December 23, 2020, FINRA issued a request for comment on Enhancements to TRACE Reporting for U.S. Treasury Securities. The proposed changes could require significant changes to trade execution and reporting systems for U.S. Treasuries as well as trading and reporting workflow changes. On January 12 and 19 FIF held calls with the FIF TRACE Working Group to discuss the rule proposal in anticipation of submitting a comment letter. The next Working Group call is scheduled for January 26 to review a first draft of the comment letter.

The series will be multiple panels for FIF Members that will address the implementation considerations of the 898 page Rule. The kickoff panel on February 1 at 4PM is the Rule Overview presented by Wayne Aaron of the Vedder Price law firm in a conversation with Matt Billings of Two Sigma and Tom Jordan, Chair of the FIF Advisory Committee. Topics in the series include The Data, Governance & Pricing, Competing Consolidators, Self-Aggregators, Transition and Dates, Retail/Institutional and Buy-Side considerations. Committed speakers to date include representatives from Cboe, Exegy,...