16 – 22 MAY 2013
saying they aren’t usually the type of market participant drawn into litigation with regulators. POST-TRADE
Conifer to open Canada office by year-end
Conifer Fund Services, the San Francisco-based fund administration arm of The Conifer Group, will open an office in Halifax, Nova Scotia as early as the third quarter in order to increase its presence throughout North America, according to WSL sister publication HFMWeek. In an exclusive interview, Jack McDonald, president and CEO of The JACK MCDONALD president and CEO of Conifer Group, The Conifer Group said the administrator decided to choose Halifax over competing locations for several advantages, including cost, proximity to clients and access to skilled talent. “One of the main drivers behind us doing this is the very rich population of undergraduate and graduate students who have special degrees in accounting, so the province is really going out of their way to accommodate this,” he said. Along with new graduates from the province’s 10 universities and 13 community colleges, Conifer will be
hiring skilled and experienced workers who have strong backgrounds in finance and accounting. The fund administrator currently has offices in San Francisco and in the British Virgin Islands. According to HFMWeek’s most recent Assets Under Administration Survey, as of October 2012, Conifer had $10.5bn in single manager hedge fund assets under administration. POST-TRADE
DTCC rebrands in line with expanded market role
The Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. is unveiling a new brand identity this month to realign its positioning with its more visible role in the financial markets. The new brand initiative is detailed in DTCC’s annual report. Marie Chinnici-Everitt, managing director and chief marketing officer, led the initiative, which includes a new positioning line, “Securing Today. Shaping Tomorrow”. “It underscores all the different roles we play. ‘Securing Today’ focuses on risk mitigation, security and transparency we provide for our clients and regulators, and ‘Shaping Tomorrow’ speaks to our role in providing thought leadership and driving change for financial markets.” Along with the positioning line, DTCC will also reveal a new logo and will overhaul its site to re-launch with a new look in the next few months. Chinnici-Everitt said the site redesign will impact the six-year-old Dtcc. com site as well as member sites used to access DTCC’s services. “One of the important things we wanted to do when thinking about rebranding was to make the site more reflective of the organization. We are not only changing the look and feel but also orienting the content to users who don’t necessarily speak the DTCC lingo,” she said.
The new site will also include a more robust search engine, include more “graphically compelling” visuals to the site and single sign-on capabilities to make it easier to navigate from any portal, Chinnici-Everitt added. Over the last year, the utility processed $1.6 quadrillion securities transactions, according to the pending annual report. Among 2012 initiatives, the report will also highlight its efforts to reduce cost and risk in the mortgage-backed securities market, expand the role of its global trade repository by adding support for overthe-counter derivatives, and adding support of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s Interim Compliant Identifier, among other things. TECHNOLOGY
FlexTrade, Derivix integration nearing completion
FlexTrade’s integration of Derivix, which it acquired last year, is expected to be finished in about six months, according to Brian Stucka, vice president of sales. The addition of Derivix capabilities will bring added risk controls and an upgraded interface to FlexTrade’s FlexOptions platform once the two platforms are fully merged later this year, Stucka said. “We’re just now adding all the features Derivix has,” he added. One of those features is the ability to test holdings across “what if” situations, Stucka noted. Traders and risk managers can tweak conditions to reflect situations such as a 5% jump in volatility and its effect on portfolios, groups of accounts or individual accounts, Stucka further explained. “It allows both traders and risk managers the ability to look ahead,” Stucka added. Further enhancements made possible by the integration include the ability to customize columns within
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