FIF CAT Tech Specs Working Group and FIF CAT Committee. The FIF CAT Tech Specs Working Group reviewed new and updated FAQs from the SROs relating to buy-ins, OTC link messages, booking for allocations, and the OPT and CND handlingInstructions. The Working Group reviewed proposals to ensure that errors are not assigned to industry members that have reported correctly. The Working Group discussed reporting for various ESPP scenarios. The Working Group and Committee reviewed and discussed the updates to the Technical Specifications and Reporting Scenarios issued by FINRA CAT on November 6,...

During the past week, FIF featured the following spotlight presentation: FIF Back Office Committee (November 10). Greg Lee of Paxos discussed Paxos’ clearing agency plan leveraging blockchain for back-office. FIF will feature the following spotlight presentations on upcoming Committee and Working Group calls: FIF Emerging Technologies Working Group (November 19 at 11 am ET). Evan Schnidman of Prattle will discuss AI efficiency in research. FIF Front Office Committee (November 30 at 11am ET). Chris Bok of OTC Markets will discuss FINRA’s proposal to retire the OTCBB and enhance...

FIF held its fourth Webinar of the year on Tuesday, November 10th with a great panel discussion on institutional options trading strategies during Covid-19, the growth of retail options, and other global options trends. FIF would like to thank the moderator Tom Jordan (Jordan & Jordan) and the panelists: John Angelos (Cboe Global Markets), Sean Feeney (Nasdaq), Andy Nybo (Burton-Taylor) and Tony Saliba (Matrix Executions). If you were not able to join the Webinar, but would like to watch the recording of the event, please email us at This email address is being protected...

State Street Corporation announced the launch of State Street MediaStats Central Bank Indicators and State Street MediaStats Thematic Indicators - two new quantitative investment insights derived from digital media. The new indicators collect unstructured data from tens of thousands of curated media sources to quantify market behavior with respect to price and risk across interest rate yields and foreign exchange. “The tone of central banks influences the way investors behave,” said Rajeev Bhargava, head of the Investor Behavior Research Team at State Street Associates. “Academic...

AccessFintech, a leading fintech company evolving the financial operating model through data and workflow collaboration, announced the launch of a new derivatives cash payments affirmation service, working with Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs and AccessFintech developed the cross-industry service working with a major Tier 1 buy-side client to embed a process that allows for the real-time supervision and scrutiny of expected cash payments associated with derivatives trading. Previously, derivative settlement processing has been operationally inefficient for buy-side clients and their brokers,...

Electronic liquidity and technology provider, Virtu Financial, has expanded its multi-asset transaction cost model offering with the launch of Fixed Income Agency Cost Estimator (FI ACE), a pre-trade analytics tool designed to provide transparency and measurement of liquidity and transaction costs in fixed income markets. FI ACE uses a proprietary pre-trade liquidity model that should help to confirm execution decision making, assist in liquidity management and help document best execution in connection with regulatory obligations. FI ACE cost estimates use Virtu’s Global Peer database for...

Intercontinental Exchange, Inc. announced it has launched clearing for Credit Default Swap (CDS) Index Options, bringing greater capital efficiencies, price discovery and risk management to the CDS market. ICE Clear Credit now offers clearing of Index Options on the CDX North American Investment Grade and High Yield indices. Index Options on the iTraxx Europe indices are expected to be added in 2021. ICE Clear Credit’s Index Options solution provides a number of innovations including a common exercise-and-assignment platform where all market participants, dealers and buy-side, can perform...

JP Morgan has partnered with environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) data science specialist RepRisk to incorporate ESG risk metrics within its data platform. The data will be available via JP Morgan’s DataQuery platform, providing clients across its trading and securities services businesses with access to ESG risk data from over 150,000 companies.  

Please join us on tomorrow, November 10th @ 2pm ET for a webinar and panel discussion on  institutional options trading strategies during Covid-19, the growth of retail options, an outlook on options market structure and initiatives in  2021 and other global options trends. Please find the full panel for Tuesday's Webinar below: John Angelos, Senior Director, Cboe Global Markets Sean Feeney, Head of Product Development and Business Strategy, Nasdaq Options Andy Nybo, Managing Director, Burton-Taylor Anthony Saliba, CEO, Matrix Executions FIF would...