By

Alastair Rutherford

Traditional and Decentralised Finance: The Era of Convergence?

The view from Ascendant Strategy is that there is opportunity to make huge efficiency gains in TradFi based on concepts currently being “tested” in the DeFi world. This is as much about market and process changes as with tech solutions enabling them. Read The Realization Group’s Financial Markets Insights paper including our contributions here
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Operational Resilience Article by Ascendant’s James Maxfield published by Thomson Reuters Regulatory Intelligence

We hear much about the potential issues arising from energy shortages. The potential impact to Capital Markets Post Trade is huge and management committees should ensure that they have considered the risk that unexpected power outages may create for their businesses.  Some of the more obvious risks may typically tend to attract the most attention,...
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Why stablecoin regulation is good

Read James Maxfield’s thoughts on this topic here. This article was originally published in Harrington Starr’s Financial Technologist magazine, available here.
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Ascendant Strategy on Harrington Starr’s Fintech Focus TV

Ascendant’s Alastair Rutherford talks with Harrington Starr’s Toby Babb on their Fintech Focus TV about collaboration in post-trade, and where digital assets might help to reduce inefficiencies in TradFi. Watch the interview here
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The Future of Post Trade will be driven by collaboration, not isolation

Ascendant Strategy has consistently found that the majority – at least 60% – of post trade “total cost of ownership” (TCO) across operations and technology for its clients is made up of people cost. Much of this is resolving processing exceptions by communicating with participants in the transaction, so purely internal changes may only result...
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Re-DeFi-ning the post trade landscape within capital markets

‘The industry spends $131 billion on post-trade settlement and servicing, driven by stubbornly high levels of inter- and intra-firm reconciliation, a lack of operational scale and an archaic and overly complex asset-servicing stack.’ Capital Markets Vision 2022 – Accenture, 2017 This was one of the headlines in the Accenture paper of 2017 titled ‘Capital Markets...
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The Future of Post Trade Will Be Driven By Collaboration, Not Isolation

Jamie Dimon, Chairman and Chief Executive of JP Morgan Chase, wrote in his most recent letter to shareholders that technology always drives change and that the waves of technological innovation are now crashing in more frequently. He said: “In today’s world, I cannot overemphasize the importance of implementing new technology.” The importance of technology was...
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Your Digital Assets Pathway for Post Trade

One of the fundamental challenges for any organisation trying to understand their digital asset future is how and what they are looking to offer. The emergence of this new asset class and the technology that underpins it has transformational potential for banks, but how and what to deploy varies wildly depending on where an organisation...
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Regulating Crypto & De-FI – Ascendant’s James Maxfield reacts to the recent FPC publication

On the 9th of March, the Financial Policy Committee (FPC) at the Bank of England published a ‘Financial Stability in Focus’ paper that laid out their thinking around the emerging world of crypto-assets and decentralised finance (DeFi) (click here). The discussion around these areas has, in my opinion, been dominated by mis-perceptions around what these terms...
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Ascendant Strategy are on the Financial Technologist magazine’s THE MOST INFLUENTIAL FINTECH FIRMS OF 2022

We are very proud to be on the list for the fourth year running! Don’t forget to check out Ascendant’s Alastair Rutherford article on the gritty topic of WHY POST TRADE NEEDS FINTECHS, which can be found here The full Financial Technologist magazine can be downloaded here.  
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