BT Unified Trading wins Financial-I Award

BT Trading System awarded quality management assurance standard

BT's Trading Systems division in the US has retained its coveted ISO 9001:2008, an international standard for quality management systems. The accreditation from Lloyd's Register Quality Assurance certifies businesses that adhere to standards that ensure continual performance improvements in pursuit of meeting regulatory requirements, customer requirements, and customer satisfaction. The assessment focused on customer satisfaction, process excellence, and continuous improvement. BT was first awarded the certificate of quality assurance was first awarded to on 15 November, 2002 and since then, it has been re-certified three times in 2005, 2008, and now in 2011. Across the globe, it has over 75 sites which have already achieved ISO 9001:2008 standards and which are covered by the BT Global Services Approved World-Wide sites certification.

BT up for three Financial Sector Technology 2012 awards

Following its success at last year's FST Awards when it carried off a top new accolade for Cloud Computing Innovation, BT has once again been nominated for the same award this year. BT is also up for two other awards: the Technology Provider of the Year Award (BT Group) and the Most Innovative Product of the Year (BT Global Banking & Financial Markets).

The winners will be announced at prestigious awards gala dinner on 28 March 2012 at the Lancaster London Hotel, Bayswater, which will be attended by over four hundred industry professionals...read more

Cloud-based solutions will become a necessity

Cloud-based solutions are gaining traction across the world according to IDC's Worldwide Financial Services 2012 Predictions. The pace of adoption differs across regions: European banks are looking for greater guidance on hybrid and public cloud usage, and North American financial services sectors increasingly using cloud services for key global risk management activities. Institutions in Africa and the Middle East too are developing an appetite for cloud-based core systems, with some banks in Latin American cautiously adopting cloud solutions. Asia still remains hesitant.

But head of industry initiatives at BT Global Banking & Financial Markets Chris Pickles believes that in future dealing rooms across the world may have no option but to adopt cloud services. The growth of high-frequency and algorithmic trading is threatening to overwhelm the networking capacity of even the largest trading firms, he said talking to markets media online, because of the spike in messaging volumes.

"Individual dealing rooms may have to deal with six million messages per second," he said – and this will entail massive changes in the systems infrastructures used at trading firms, which hitherto have been designed as silos to support specific asset classes or lines of business.

"At some point, financial institutions will need to wake up to the fact that they've been designing systems on an ad hoc basis, and will need to develop cloud-based solutions due to the sheer volumes of data," he warned.

Download IDC slide presentation

BT hosts 'Big Data' roundtable

The exponential increase in the sheer quantity of real time market data is a significant challenge and recently the aptly named concept of 'Big Data' has been bubbling to the surface. How new and different is all this – or is it in reality just a logical extension of what we have all seen before? What are the business drivers guiding any new technologies? What are the real business risks of not being able to comprehensively digest and make timely sense of this torrent of data, and what can we learn from similar experiences outside the financial services sector? Tsunamis, data or otherwise, have a tendency to wreak havoc with the unprepared – how prepared is the financial services industry? These were some of the issues discussed at the Software & Information Industry Association's Financial Information Services Division's Real-time Technology Roundtable which was hosted at BT Centre in London on Thursday 19 January. On the agenda were the technology issues generated by the need to work with such huge quantities of data in real-time or near real-time, and actual or potential solutions were discussed...read more

Feeling the strain: Alex Foster, global head of sales at BT Radianz talks to FS Technology about the data explosion

BT sponsors Clearing and Settlement Working Group

The inaugural meeting of the Clearing & Settlement Working Group (CAS-WG) took place at BT's offices at 81 Newgate Street on 29 February. Sponsored by BT, the Working Group has been launched by the Financial Services Club in partnership with the Realization Group.

Clearing and settlement, and in particular clearing, will be massively impacted by new regulations being drafted and implemented across the world, including Basel III, Dodd-Frank, the Vickers Report and MiFID II. The working group provides an opportunity for open discussion and debate amongst senior market practitioners and service providers about these issues and their technology implications for clearing and settlement. Specialist groups will discuss specific areas of interest – standards, technologies, reference data, custodial services, etc – between each of the main plenary meetings, and will provide specific input to the regulatory bodies (the FSA, its successor bodies the PRA and CBA, and Michel Barnier's team in the EC) on the business and technology implications of implementing the regulations.

For more information about future meetings contact Chris Skinner at the Financial Services Club

Read the inaugural meeting report

Lessons from the UK Financial Authorities' 'day of disaster'

The UK Financial Authorities have published their full report on last year's business continuity stress test – and BT has provided some pointers to help financial services companies deal with potential business disruption during the 2012 Games...read more

Download the Market-wide Exercise 2011 report from the UK Financial Sector Continuity website