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 hereRead More
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...Read More
‘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...Read More
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...Read More
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...Read More
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...Read More
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. Read More
James Maxfield and Alastair Rutherford (Co-Chairs of the ISITC Europe CIC’s Post Trade Forum) and Gary Wright (Director of ISITC Europe CIC) talk to Asset Servicing Times’ Jenna Lomax about the association’s upcoming post-trade survey — and what it aims to outline — as the industry continues to feel the advantages and pressures of global...Read More
The blockchain/crypto/digital/de-fi evolution of financial services continues to gather momentum – with industry commentators predicting business model disruption that delivers a banking industry that looks very different from today. But whilst conceptual parallels with the world of crypto stimulate debate and industry consortiums explore proof of concepts, many across the industry struggle to conceptualise what...Read More
The pandemic shook off some of the inertia that has dogged the capital markets industry, but many organisations are still hamstrung by the inefficiency of their front to back operating models. Whilst a decade of regulation and electronification may have streamlined the front part of business models, for many their middle and back office has...Read More