Wall Street Letter VOL. XLV, NO. 36 - December 2013 | Page 8

NEWS

business to South America to take
advantage pension fund managers in
these regions and the world trading in
US ETFs, Wallach noted. The move is
intended to attract northbound flow,
he explained.
TECHNOLOGY

Verdande to hire
financial team after
IEX partnership

08

Verdande Technology plans to hire
experienced IT and other types of
staff in Q1 of 2014, according to
Joanne Kinsella, CEO of financial
services.
The data analytics and predictive software vendor, has partnered
with IEX Group to give the latter, a
FINRA-registered alternative trading system, Case-Based Reasoning
technology in the form of its VTEdge
platform, which allows for real-time
surveillance by comparing real-time
data with historical analytics to identify patterns from events that led to
crashes or outages.
Kinsella noted this client, and others, are the reason why the company
is hiring.
“We’ve hired four people in the
past three months and are looking
at more hires for Q1 in the realm of
data scientists,
project management executives
with financial
service experience and senior
technologists,” said
Kinsella.
“At this point
JOANNE KINSELLA
with the level
of intensity we
are facing, there
is a need for
people with experience and all being
brought on are exceptional industry
people that have worked for tier one
investment banks or major software
development programs.”

POST-TRADE

FIX to standardize back office messaging

F

IX Protocol plans to fully standardize
back office messages for firms trading
fixed income, FX and equity swaps and
options, according to Dave Tolman, chair
of the FIX Trading Community Buy-side
Post-Trade Working Group and technology
manager at Greenline Financial Technologies.
Tolman said members of the US Buyside
Working Group are pushing for a FIX
standard for the messages as they feel legacy
messaging providers such as SWIFT are not
meeting demands in these asset classes.
“We are in the process of working on
standardization of the back office for fixed
income, equity swaps, FX, and equity
options,” said Tolman. “By the end of that
process we will have a post-trade framework
across asset classes and is more or less the
same framework for all of the asset classes.”

Andrew Muir, head of standards implementation at SWIFT noted there is an
overlap of back office standardization, but
both utilities adhere to a dictionary of terms
standardized between them, allowing end
users who may be using FIX to communicate with entities using SWIFT.
Muir noted that high-frequency trading
strategies benefit from FIX but SWIFT is
more suited for high-risk securities settlement.
“There are good reasons, especially in
HFT, why a very low bandwidth implementation of FIX makes sense, as they want
to communicate orders and indication
of interest at lightning speed,” said Muir.
“SWIFT on the other hand, is in world of
high risk, high reliability, and SWIFT fits the
profile of securities settlement and payment
messages.”

VTEdge was crafted in response
to client need for an offering that
can pre-emptively flag system issues,
quelling disasters where everyone is
left with a broken venue or platform
due to an error not caught in time,
according to Kinsella.
There has been a paradigm shift
from traditional system monitoring
in 2013 from an indicator turning red
means that the shit has hit the fan and
it is too late to one where outages can
be prevented through proper technology,” said Kinsella.
TRADING FIRMS

Brownstone aims
to bolster bond
coverage
Brownstone is looking to hire corporate and municipal bond market
vets to add to its roster for 2014 in an
effort to expand bond coverage, according to Doug Lowey, CEO.

The company opened a San Francisco office earlier this year (WSL
Online, 10/01/2013) to strengthen its
move into the municipal bond market, according to Lowey, who added
the market has grown substantially
but still has potential to encompass
more of the market.
Brownstone is targeting an expansion of its distribution network,
which requires a stronger staff of
seasoned bond professionals, according to Lowey.
“The mold for these hires would be
professional corporate and municipal
bonds salesmen with a focus on the
middle market and who have established registered investment advisor
relationships.”
Lowey noted one trend in the
corporate and municipal bond space
is that some firms are too big for local
boutique firms but also too small to
be picked up by New York firms.
“We’ve seen a trend where clients
are demanding more high-touch,
high-quality service than they’ve been