Sven Roth, chief digital officer at SDX, said the new exchange will initially focus on digital tokens on its own distributed ledger technology before tokenizing existing securities, according to a story in Markets Media. SIX, which manages Switzerland’s stock exchange and market infrastructure, said last July that it would be launching SIX Digital Exchange, a fully regulated and integrated trading, settlement and custody infrastructure for digital assets. SIX said it had chosen Corda Enterprise, R3’s blockchain platform, to provide the underlying technology for SDX. The SDX...

Morgan Stanley’s second-in-command, Colm Kelleher, is retiring, according to a story in The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Kelleher joined Morgan Stanley in 1989 and will officially step down on June 30th of this year.  As the firm’s president, he has overseen its restructuring to become a financial-services giant. Kelleher was “instrumental in helping the Firm navigate the depths of the financial crisis,” Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman said in the memo.

BNY Mellon has appointed a senior artificial intelligence and robotics expert as it looks to evolve traditional services into a more digitized environment. Michael Demissie joins the world’s largest custodian to lead its activities in AI, machine learning and distributed ledger technology (DLT). He will join the bank this month, reporting to Roman Regelman, BNY Mellon’s head of digital development. He joins from State Street where he was previously a senior vice president for business transformation, focusing on robotics and AI. Demissie joins BNY Mellon amid a company-wide...

Deutsche Bank Securities Inc. and Nasdaq announced that Deutsche Bank’s new Single Dealer Platform will be developed by Deutsche Bank, but hosted and operated by Nasdaq’s market technology. The expected go-live is targeted for Q3 2019. As a fully hosted platform, Nasdaq will also manage the system’s operations, including portions of risk controls, venue surveillance, trade reporting and clearing facilitation. The platform is custom built for scalability and integrating new technologies as Deutsche Bank further evolves and advances its marketplace.

FIF Cybersecurity Working Group - Reviewed a Homeland Security Memo for US Owners and Operators Using GPS to Obtain UTC Time and explored the GCA Cybersecurity Toolkit for small to medium sized businesses. FIF CAT Working Group - Reviewed additional Error Correction tools proposed by the SROs/FINRA, the SROs approach to ATS order flow, SRO updates to the negotiated trade/trade as a result of a quote reporting approach, requested feedback on whether the re-ordering of fields within events would cause coding issues in CSV and feedback on the identification of redundant reporting...

FIF is forming a Tax Information Reporting Working Group.  The purpose of the working group will be to discuss recommendations and process improvements related to:  1) leveraging new and evolving technology to revise tax reporting processes; 2) industry best practices, 3) increasing tax reporting efficiencies; and 4) recommendations/best practices related to tax reporting including: Form 1099; From 1042-S (including applicable withholding processes required under 1099, NRA, and FATCA); Form 2439; B-Notice and TIN Matching Pension/IRA related forms; State Information...

Raymond James has stated that Chief Financial Officer Jeff Julien, who has been with the firm since 1983, will retire at year-end. He is set to be replaced by Paul Shoukry, the firm’s treasurer and senior vice president of finance and investor relations. As part of Julien’s retirement, he will remain a director on the bank board and a member of several management committees.

In a bid to provide greater transparency into the equities market for individual investors, Cboe Global Markets has submitted a rule filing related to retail priority, according to a story in MarketsMedia. In a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Cboe said that the proposal will serve to benefit millions of individual investors by introducing enhanced order book priority for their orders. The proposal would provide execution priority to retail limit orders on the Cboe EDGX Exchange (EDGX), meaning that the priority for orders on EDGX would be price/display/retail/time.

Jez Mohideen, global chief digital officer at Nomura, predicted that in five years’ time between 30% and 40% of the business will operate differently due to digitization, according to a story in MarketsMedia. Mohideen said that the main remit of the wholesale digital office is to improve the customer experience, increase efficiency, grow revenues and help the firm enter new businesses. He said, “In the past nine months we have focused on our data strategy, the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning in electronic trading, setting up labs and investigating digital...