Sasha Mills

Speaking at the launch event for the UK’s T+1 transition today, Mills highlights how a shorter settlement cycle will mean that firms and central counterparties face lower counterparty risks, which the BoE anticipate will lead to “significant amounts of margin being released by CCPs to members and their clients”. 

Explaining the £1 billion figure, the BoE said the estimate relates to margin posted to support UK cash equities clearing and applies the approximate margin reductions seen in another jurisdiction which has transitioned to T+1 from T+2. 

Mills noted the amount was “a significant sum which could be used by market participants for other productive purposes, supporting the UK economy”. 

In a speech to an audience at the UK Accelerated Settlement Taskforce event The T+1 Journey Starts Now Mills voiced the BoE’s support for the transition to T+1, noting it should reduce the costs and risks associated with the existing misalignment of settlement cycles and ensure alignment with the US. 

“The transition to T+1 should catalyse firms’ investment in automation and standardisation, leading to lower settlement costs in the medium term and more efficient markets,” she added. 

The UK will move to T+1 on 11 October 2027, in line with the EU and Switzerland. 

James Pike, chief revenue officer at Taskize, commented: “If everything runs smoothly from an operational preparation perspective, the release of £1 billion is a tangible reality. However, the challenge currently lies in ensuring a successful migration by October 2027. Firms must act early to review and adapt their post-trade operations to ensure a seamless transition. This will require huge investment in technology and process reengineering, not to mention close collaboration between industry banks, custodians, and fund managers. The lessons learned from the US shift to T+1 earlier this year highlight the importance of preparation and coordination.”

The post T+1 will release £1 billion of margin in the UK, says BoE appeared first on The TRADE.

Oliver Haste

This move has allowed stakeholders insight into what CTs could look like, aimed at allowing participants to begin planning for how they might use the tapes.

Oliver Haste, chief administrative officer, designate, Bondtape, said: “These prototypes show the market that we are already capable of delivering robust, high-quality tapes and that we are committed to working together with the industry to develop the best product. 

“While these prototypes are only a small window into what the final tapes will look like, we believe in the power of demonstrating working products as early as possible to inspire confidence and seek actionable feedback.” 

Focused on both the EU and UK’s transparency regimes respectively, the prototypes consist of a ‘blotter’ each, comprised of the trade reports published on a given day. 

Specifically, the blotter updates intraday and includes a sorting and filtering functionality, allowing users to search by: maturities, venues, specific sets of international securities identification numbers (ISINs), and other areas. 

Read more: EU and UK regulators reveal updated plans for bond tape frameworks

According to Bondtape, the prototype “includes a functionality to ‘cleanse’ the reports, removing ‘out-of-date’ entries and leaving only the most recent, accurate version of a trade report,” importantly meeting FCA requirements for providers to offer both ‘raw’ and ‘clean’ data, which when used in practice work to prevent the ‘double-counting’ of trades.

The post Bond CTP contender Bondtape launches live prototypes for UK and EU appeared first on The TRADE.

Haynes has nearly 50 years of experience across the industry, working in several high profile roles across the equity space, including as chief executive of Chi-X Europe and ITG International, and of course Aquis. The TRADE awarded Haynes with the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018, recognising his significant and enduring impact on the industry. 

Anthony Santostefano joined Stern Brothers as senior vice president, institutional equity trading and sales, following seven and a half years with Cabrera Capital Markets. In his new role, Santostefano will be based in New York and focused on live markets during the European equity sessions. 

Whilst at Cabrera Capital Markets, Santostefano most recently served as director of EMEA equities sales trading. Elsewhere during his career, he has worked extensively in APAC-related sales, including as an equity sales trader at Topeka Capital Markets and head of institutional sales, US emerging growth at Sidoti & Company. Santostefano’s other roles include stints as APAC equity sales trading at Maybank Kim Eng Securities USA, desk manager, equity sales trading at Auerback Grayson, and as a trader at both Natixis and Scudder Investments. 

Liquidnet made two new appointments within its multi-asset services team, adding Patric Okumi and Samuel Lowres to lead multi-asset sales. Okumi joined Liquidnet’s multi-asset services team from TP ICAP Group, where he spent the last 11 years in broking and trading-related roles. He was also part of TP ICAP’s equity trading desk before building out the single stock equity and ETF RFQ offering on Fusion, the firm’s electronic platform. 

Meanwhile, Lowres was promoted to the role, having joined Liquidnet three years ago as part of the Liquidity Partnerships team. Lowres has a background in low-touch electronic trading and execution consulting, including the provision of data and transaction cost analysis. Liquidnet added that he brings considerable technical expertise to this role. 

The London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) appointed Hiroki Tomiyasu as head of post-trade, Japan, and head of post-trade solutions, APAC. Tomiyasu joined LSEG from Morgan Stanley MUFG Securities, where he most recently served as managing director, head of final investment decision (FID) risk for Asia. Elsewhere during his tenure at Morgan Stanley, Tomiyasu served as COO/front risk, Japan FID, and counterparty risk management, APAC FID. Before joining Morgan Stanley, he held positions spanning risk, technology and sales at the Development Bank of Japan.  

The post People Moves Monday: Aquis Exchange, Stern Brothers, Liquidnet and more… appeared first on The TRADE.

Allen Zimmerman, SimCorp

The move will enable SimCorp to complement its Axioma risk models and portfolio construction capabilities with Yield Book’s fixed income analytics to deliver analytics for securitised debt.  

Yield Book products provide analytical insight into financial products in the fixed income sphere, including government and corporate bonds, US municipal bonds, mortgages and asset-backed securities and derivatives. 

This integration will provide SimCorp clients with improved access to fixed income analytics including risk forecasting, sensitivity analysis, stress testing and factor-based decomposition of risk.  

These capabilities aim to help institutional investors to address risk factors that are specific to this asset class and help them make better investment and risk decisions. 

Read more: Fireside Friday with… Yield Book’s Emily Prince 

“This partnership extends the depth of our fixed income capabilities by leveraging Yield Book’s market-renowned prepayment models and analytics directly within our products to support the most sophisticated fixed income and multi-asset managers,” said Allen Zimmerman, managing director, head of Americas at SimCorp. 

“This is another step toward enabling faster and more informed investment decisions.”  

This latest development builds on SimCorp’s existing collaboration with LSEG Data and Analytics for market and reference data, established in 2024, allowing for improved access to LSEG data across the investment platform SimCorp One. 

“The integration of Yield Book’s best-in-class fixed income analytics with Axioma Risk enables more clients with market-leading data, analytics and risk management tools at their fingertips,” said Emily Prince, group head of analytics at LSEG. 

The post SimCorp and Yield Book partner on analytics suite integration appeared first on The TRADE.

Bernard Sabrier

The new entity, named Kepler Cheuvreux Unigestion Equities, is set to focus on quantitative strategies and together will manage more than €3 billion in assets, subject to regulatory approvals. 

The first stage of integration will see Unigestion transfer the €3 billion in assets under management – specifically in the form of mandates and investment funds – and simultaneously integrate the entirety of its equities team into Kepler Cheuvreux’s operational infrastructure.

Following this, Kepler and Unigestion will create the jointly owned entity, alongside the management team, focused on accelerating the business’ development through external growth initiatives.

“Unigestion brings its quantitative and qualitative public equities expertise, enhancing Kepler Cheuvreux’s well-established research capabilities. This partnership merges fundamental and quantitative research approaches, optimising portfolio management while diversifying and expanding the range of investment strategies,” said the firms in a joint statement. 

In addition, Kepler Cheuvreux is contributing a sales force of over 130 professionals and more than 1,300 institutional clients across Europe, North America, and MENA.

The firms are also set to integrate ESG criteria into the management processes for Kepler Cheuvreux Unigestion Equities, including maintaining an “active dialogue” with portfolio companies.

Speaking about the partnership, Laurent Quirin, chair of the supervisory board at Kepler Cheuvreux and Bernard Sabrier, executive chair of Unigestion’s board, highlighted that this partnership is being driven by shared ambition to “provide institutional investors with sophisticated, innovative solutions tailored to the evolving market landscape”.

They added: “The combination of Unigestion’s quantitative expertise with Kepler Cheuvreux’s research, execution and distribution capabilities, enables us to unlock unique synergies and offer a distinctive, high-value proposition.”

The post Kepler Cheuvreux and Unigestion unveil joint €3 billion asset management plans appeared first on The TRADE.

One is the use of anonymous wheels for venue selection. Customers are particularly keen to show that they are monitoring real time execution quality, venue selection etc. We’re also seeing the concentration of flow with fewer providers. ZebrA-X is creating a hub for trading globally for the bank. We’ll be able to concentrate venue choice, algo choice and a high level of customer service in one location. We’re working with a number of brand new venues and innovators in the market to keep this current. The key for us is to differentiate ourselves from bulge.

When you put technology in the middle of a brokerage offering it tends to accelerate successes and therefore you’d expect the big to get bigger. The more a brokerage business looks like an exchange, the better it does. Much like you’ve seen with internet businesses from 20 years ago, you tend to get the weak ones withering away quite quickly. Due to commission wallets and equity issuance, the market’s extremely competitive so you’re seeing some fallout across different business silos, including electronic and low touch trading.

How are market conditions driving these low touch developments?

A couple of years ago, the goal was to capture retail and reinvent RSP mechanisms. Several banks and brokerages tried to do that. Clients we speak to – in particular wealth managers – are trying to cut costs. They’re doing that by electronifying the smallest 10% of trades. Big clients want to be able to interact or harvest that flow. If on a company’s results day there’s lots of retail sellers, some clients love to build a position by trading against retail because they have better information.

ZebrA-X has one OMS provider called Infront where orders go for three seconds all or nothing. If they don’t execute, those clients’ tickets then go to the RSP of the whole street. In that respect, we’ve disintermediated part of the RSP mechanism. The first bite of ZebrA-X algo goes exclusively to Aquis for 12 microseconds on an all nothing basis so if there’s an institutional order resting there, the retail order can cross at mid or better against that ticket before it goes off and checks all the other venues. Clients can do these kind of trades on a match basis in Aquis Auction on Demand (AOD) and then further down the life cycle of the ticket, a piece will rest firm in Aquis for the life of the ticket which enables us to hand on heart say you cross institutional to retail, retail to retail etc.

The more you electronify the business the more business you do. TCA – traditionally on which execution wheels are built – looks at three things: one is average fill size, two is pre-trade signalling and three is post-trade reversion. Typically, five seconds pre-trade and five seconds post-trade.

How are clients leveraging low touch offerings differently today?

Overarchingly customers want to do block business. They want to finish their tickets by the close of business. There will be some clients who’ll flash our dark aggregator with their tickets for a couple of minutes and then change the order into a benchmark algo. They’ll be some clients who’ll rest the block with us all day long and there will be some clients who rest fractions of tickets and work out where the liquidity is on a particular day, using it as a radar.

One of the key things we’ve done is to connect to systematic internaliser’s (SI) directly. If you can rest benign blocks of stock in certain SIs and get good fill rates you will get extended better liquidity down the road much like reputational scoring seen on Cboe or Turquoise Block Discovery does reputation scoring. There’s a move amongst us and our peers to connect directly to these bilateral SIs because customers want it. Customers’ overarching need is to do the block. They don’t want to miss the print on an exchange where they’re not represented.

We’re building proprietary tools with big xyt. Traditional TCA is T+1 so heads of trading look at execution quality from the day, week, month before. What we are building are live tools that we can drop and drag into the Bloomberg chat and say to the customer look have you thought about doing this with this ticket in order to get this outcome? For us, over the years we’ve seen lots of client chats become quite dormant. On the buy-side, some customers we speak to have hundreds of chats. For us to be relevant in an electronic space we have to have interesting content. If we can drag and drop a picture with what they should do for that particular order based on 20 days of geometric moving averages which big xyt have worked out for us, that’s extremely valuable.

How do you expect the low touch competitive landscape to evolve in the years to come?

Looking at the McLagan survey numbers for EMEA including UK, the low touch wallet has gone from around 30% to just under 40%. Therefore, having an electronic offering at the centre of a broader execution offering is really important. I’d say commissions have bottomed out on the low touch side and so going forward the way to win in the electronic space is really understand your customer. Customers want to see that you’ve got some academic rigour around your processes and your venue selection as well as a good commission rate even though you’re basically offering a high touch service at a low touch commission rate.

The roles of the traditional high touch sales trader and low touch electronic sales trader role are converging and people are talking about where blocks are traded and how they can optimise their outcome on a particular ticket. We’re going to be producing fortnightly research on what’s going on in the dark venue space. Separately we’ve engaged with another three innovation companies BPX Exchange which is waiting for its MTF licence, OptimX and OneChronos.

What developments are you seeing in commissions?

Large, sophisticated buy-side can build their own algo suite and they’re members all the exchanges so in order to make a new connection you have to stand out on several metrics. Two key metrics are venue reach and customer service. In flight analytics and unique wealth management and retail flow are also key. Typically, a big buy-side customer might have five bulge algo connections and then one or two spaces for companies like Investec where we’ve got an angle or differentiation along those lines. Given the high market share of the cash business here – just under 6% of the FTSE 250 – there’s decent resident flow sitting in ZebrA-X along with other wealth management flow which new customers can interact via our mechanisms.

If you rigorously control costs, you can still create profitable business on a standalone basis. Depending on how you negotiate with venues and exchanges is massively important. No one saying that margins are huge anymore but I’ve seen it done where you can run the business profitably on a standalone basis.

The post Fireside Friday with… Investec’s Dominic Lowres appeared first on The TRADE.

Gavin White

The development will see trading hours go from the existing six and a half hours per trading day, to 16 hours.  

Specifically, the extended session will include access the US pre- and post-market periods. 

The launch aims to provide increased access to the US markets for traders, namely for those based in Asia. 

Extended hours trading will be powered by Cboe’s consolidated data feed, the Cboe One Feed. 

The Cboe One Feed provides quote and trade data for a unified view of the market from all four Cboe US equities exchanges: BZX Exchange, BYX Exchange, EDGX Exchange and EDGA Exchange. 

“The introduction of extended hours trading for over 1,000 US equity and ETF CFDs reinforces our commitment to innovation and client-centric solutions,” said Gavin White, group chief executive at 26 Degrees Global Markets.  

“We were one of the first prime of primes to launch equity CFDs via API to brokers back in 2019, and now, by significantly expanding trading hours in US markets, we’re providing brokers with greater flexibility, enhanced liquidity, and more opportunities to serve both new and existing clients.”  

Clients of 26 Degrees will also benefit from no additional commissions during the US pre- and post-market and the acceptance of all order types, including market orders, during all trading sessions, the firm added.  

“As more global investors look to invest in the US markets, Cboe aims to provide the needed data and access through collaborations with industry partners like 26 Degrees Global Markets,” said Adam Inzirillo, global head of Cboe Data Vantage.  

“We are pleased to provide their clients with access to the Cboe One Feed, which provides high-quality and real-time US equity market data and supports 26 Degrees and Cboe’s shared commitment to innovation and client-centric solutions.” 

The post 26 Degrees expands trading hours for US equity CFDs appeared first on The TRADE.

The post Stern Brothers appoints ex-Cabrera Capital Markets trader to institutional equity trading and sales team appeared first on The TRADE.

The bond index franchise includes bond indices spanning government, credit, and emerging markets bonds.  

In addition, the franchise includes tools and analytics which support the bespoke development of fixed income exposures. 

“We are excited to announce another significant step forward in our index expansion strategy, designed to strengthen our fixed income indexing capabilities, and broaden the services we provide to a growing international network of clients and partners,” said Tom Hendrickson, president, TMX VettaFi.  

“We see tremendous opportunity for indexing across the fixed income asset class – especially with the growth of bond ETFs – and we look forward to partnering with even more asset managers to unlock new bond ETF innovation.”   

Read more: TMX Group expands data-driven analytics and indexing solutions through $848 million VettaFi acquisition 

The development becomes the fourth acquisition by TMX VettaFi over the past 18 months. Recent acquisitions include iNDEX Research in October 2024, the ROBO Global index suite in April 2023 and EQM Indexes in September 2023.  

“Today fixed income represents approximately 20% of the ETF market, yet the total global bond market is $140 trillion, compared to the $115 trillion global equity market,” said Brian Coco, head of index product at TMX VettaFi.  

“With even stronger fixed income indexing capabilities,  VettaFi can truly provide outcome-oriented solutions to our clients across asset classes, as well as more precision exposures within fixed income.”  

The post TMX VettaFi Acquires Credit Suisse bond index suite from UBS appeared first on The TRADE.

Following this, the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has welcomed the recommendations, alongside the Government and the Bank of England.   

The FCA stated that it supports the transition to T+1 settlement in UK markets and calls on the industry to engage and start planning as soon as possible.   

“We highlighted how the move to T+1 will make our markets more efficient and support growth in our recent letter to the Prime Minister. We will support industry as they move to T+1 and expect firms to engage and plan early,” said Nikhil Rathi, chief executive at the FCA. 

The plan published by the AST includes a Code of Conduct for market participants, confirming that 11 October 2027 will be the first trading date in UK cash equities for settlement on a T+1 cycle; aligning with the European Union and Switzerland.  

Elsewhere in its report, the AST included five behavioural commitments including a push for automation in SSIs, corporate actions, stock lending recalls, and a focus on ‘action this day’ urging firms to begin planning and where practicable, immediate implementation.  

Read more: UK taskforce publishes blueprint for T+1 transition  

At the time of publication of the report, Andrew Douglas, chair of the UK T+1 AST, said: “This is a milestone in the UK’s journey to T+1 settlement and reflects a substantial amount of work and co-operation across the industry.  

“We have a date and a detailed plan for the way ahead. Market participants should start planning now ahead of the 2025 budget process for project funding in 2026.  Automation will be a key component of a successful implementation.”  

The post FCA welcomes UK taskforce final report on the move to T+1 appeared first on The TRADE.