Waters Wavelength

Martin Boyd, global head of FIS’s institutional and wholesale business unit, which represents the legacy SunGard suite of services, joins to discuss everything from fintechs to regulation to machine learning to cloud. Before that, though, Anthony and James provide their takeaway after writing extensively about the Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT).   CAT 2:15-18:00 Anthony and James look at the train...

Bryan Cross, head of UBS Asset Management’s Quantitative Evidence and Data Science team (QED), joins the podcast to talk about why the firm created the unit in 2018 and examines the alternative data space. 3:00 What led UBS Asset Management to create the QED group? 6:00 Active versus Passive, and how alternative data fits in. 9:00 It’s still early days in the alternative data industry. 13:30 Which...

Lars Ottersgård, head of market technology for Nasdaq, joins to discuss what he sees as being the biggest tech trends in the capital markets for 2019 and beyond. 1:15 Lars takes a quick look back at highlights from 2018. 2:30 He then breaks down what he thinks some of the key tech trends will be for 2019 and beyond. (Cloud will continue to be big.) 6:00 He also thinks that 2019 will be the year fo...

First (1:00), the final phases of initial margin rules are expected to capture over the next two years more than 1,000 buy-side and sell-side firms, which technology providers see as potential customers—what are the tech challenges? Then (12:00), James discusses his profile of Robert and Richard Michaud of New Frontier Advisors and why it’s important for technologists to understand investment theo...

Adam Sussman, head of market structure and liquidity partnerships for Liquidnet, joins the podcast to talk about the Members Exchange (MEMX), which is a proposed new venue for trading US stocks that is backed by a consortium of financial firms: Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Charles Schwab, Citadel Securities, E*Trade, Fidelity Investments, Morgan Stanley, UBS, TD Ameritrade, and Virtu Financial....

This week Bill Murphy, chief technology officer of Blackstone Group, joins to discuss his firm’s migration to the public cloud and what he views as being best practices for going to the cloud. This is Bill's fourth time on the show. Here are the links to his previous conversations. https://www.waterstechnology.com/industry-issues-initiatives/3473326/waters-wavelength-podcast-episode-105-blackstone...

Anthony and James discuss the trends that they think will dominate the headlines in 2019: https://www.waterstechnology.com/data-management/4045791/the-best-longform-stories-of-2019 Artificial Intelligence (2:00) Blockchain (3:00) Back to AI (4:00) Cloud (6:00) Regulation (9:00) Alternative Data (14:00) Quantum Computing (16:45) M&A (17:30) Market Data Fees (22:00) WatersTechnology (24:00) The Best...

With James away in London, Wei-Shen Wong, Asia editor for WatersTechnology, calls in from Hong Kong to give her perspective on trends unfolding in the Asia-Pacific region. They talk about blockchain (3:15), cryptocurrencies and—separately—tokenization (14:15), various forms of artificial intelligence and automation efforts (20:00), the proliferation of cloud usage in the region (25:30), and the fe...

This week, Anthony and James talk about some of the themes and discussions at our flagship Waters USA conference, which was held in New York City on December 3. Then, James sits down with Raymond Zenkich, president and chief operating officer of crypto insurer BlockRe, to talk about some of the challenges of offering insurance products in such a new and risky market. 2:00 James and Anthony revisit...

After a brief break, Anthony and James are back. This week they look ahead to Waters USA, the December issue of Waters, and Brexit. 1:00 Waters USA will be held on Monday, Dec. 3, at the Convene on W 46th Street in Manhattan. Anthony first looks at some of the highlights—cloud, artificial intelligence, alternative data, regulation, blockchain—for the all-day conference. If you are an end-user, thi...

This week, Anthony and James look at three news stories. First, a group of central securities depositories are exploring how their roles are translatable to crypto-asset infrastructure. Next, the Depository Trust and Clearing Corp. is moving to the next phase in its project to “re-platform” its credit derivatives processing utility using blockchain technology. And finally, IHS Markit officially un...

This week, Anthony and James first take a look at the fight brewing between the exchanges and the trading firms over market data fees, with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) serving as the referee (2:00). Then they caution listeners about believing everything you read when it comes to crypto journalism (11:00). They wrap things up by talking about their favorite underrated movies of all...

Rick Lane, CEO of Trading Technologies, joins the podcast to discuss the challenges of completely shifting from a monolith, hard-install platform to a software-as-a-solution (SaaS) delivery basis. He also talks about Chicago’s burgeoning institutional crypto scene. But before that, Anthony and James hit on stories coming out of Sibos, as well as the alternative data space. In the News 1:45 A quick...

This week, Scott Mullins, worldwide financial services business development lead at Amazon Web Services (AWS), joins the podcast to discuss how capital markets firms are embracing public clouds, how they will look to differentiate themselves as costs come down while capacity increases, and how clouds can help in the evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) tools. But before that, Anthony and Jame...

This week, Anthony and James look at key themes that arose at several conferences from around the globe over the last two weeks: Brexit and how it will impact Mifid II, disillusionment with blockchain, and data quality challenges. 2:00 Shocking, there are major data challenges relating to Mifid II, according to the chairman of the Autorité des Marchés Financiers (AMF) Robert Ophéle. Get this: ther...

This week, Octavio Marenzi, co-founder and CEO of Opimas, joins the podcast to look at how capital markets firms are incorporating web-scrapping tools in their investment processes, and examines some of the key challenges they face. But before that, with the Blackstone-led consortium’s acquisition of Thomson Reuters’ Financial & Risk business closed, Anthony and James talk about what might be ahea...

This week, Eric Bernstein, president of Broadridge’s asset management solutions business, joins the podcast to discuss some of the challenges that buy-side firms in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region are facing, as they try an incorporate emerging technologies amid a fragmented regulatory environment. Before that, Anthony and James talk about two companies that are changing course. 1:00 IHS Markit has...

This week, Anthony and James first look at Nasdaq’s $190 million bid for Cinnober Financial Technologies (1:00-9:30) and then they examine what Wall Street has learned in the 10 years since the collapse of Lehman Brothers (9:30-22:30). Contrary to some, they think that the industry has learned many lessons since September 2008. They wrap things up by taking a peek at New York University (NYU) offe...

Gerard Francis, global head of enterprise data for Bloomberg, joins Anthony Malakian on the podcast to discuss data fragmentation issues in the capital markets. Bloomberg announced this week the launch of Enterprise Access Point, an online open data and linked data platform that provides normalized reference, pricing, regulatory and historical datasets for Bloomberg Data License clients. Toward th...

This week Anthony and James dig into IHS Markit's new cloud-based TradeServ platform, which will eventually replace MarkitSERV's DSMatch platform, and host MarkitWire, Markit Trade Manager, among others. Since the rollout is also connected to the Depository Trust & Clearing Corp.'s (DTCC) new Trade Information Warehouse (TIW), which will be built using blockchain technology and is expected to be r...

The September issue of Waters will mark our 25th anniversary as a publication. For it, Anthony and James spoke with over three-dozen senior executives in technology to hear their thoughts as to which technologies and enhancements will transform the capital markets over the next quarter century. For the podcast, they provide some takeaways from those discussions. Check out the September issue of Wa...

This week, Josephine Gallagher, European reporter for Waters, calls in from London to talk with Anthony about the exchange-traded funds (ETF) marketplace. After speaking with experts from Goldman Sachs Asset Management, Vanguard, State Street Global Advisors and more for her August feature, she explains how technology is playing a greater role in this space, how alternative data and robo advisors...

Kathryn Guarini, vice president of IBM Industry Research, and Bob Sutor, vice president of IBM Q strategy and ecosystem for IBM Research, talk with Anthony about advancements that have been made in the quantum space and explore what might be ahead. 2:45 Bob starts off by explaining where we are today with quantum development, how we got here and what some of the next benchmarks might be. 6:00 With...

Greg Skibiski, co-founder and CEO of Thasos Group, a startup that provides geospatial data to the hedge fund industry, joins the podcast to discuss the alternative data sector and provides insights into some of the challenges, trends and use cases for this information. Beginning-1:45 Greg Skibiski joins the podcast and gives a quick recap of what Thasos has rolled out. 1:45-3:40 What are the bigge...

Last week, Anthony and James discussed the announcement that State Street was buying Charles River Development. Well, a week later, and after speaking with over a dozen industry sources, they are back to dig deeper into this significant acquisition (2:15). But first, they look at some recent developments in the bitcoin ETF space, which is a topic they broached two weeks ago. This time, though, the...