Today, HYPER has officially unveiled to market. HYPER is an online cloud platform that confidentially matches up the C-Suite with relevant leadership positions based on their experience.  

Unlike mid-level job positions –C-level positions remain hidden, and recruiting at this senior level is notoriously hard. As is discreet job hunting at this level – when was the last time you saw a job advertisement for a CEO position available? But new independent research commissioned by HYPER shows that over 78% of executives wish it was easier for them to be identified for a new career opportunity, yet over 90%+ of senior opportunities are hidden.

HYPER is a brand new platform created to provide executives with discreet matching into unpublished senior leadership opportunities. Using intelligent algorithm driven ‘tightness of fit’ scoring – senior candidates and recruitment companies can get under the surface of this elusive, hidden job market and drill down specifically to what is available and currently trending against specific geographies, functions, industries, profiles and skills that are in demand.

Highlighting its growing influence in the private markets industry, eVestment reported today a strategic partnership with the Institutional Limited Partners Association (ILPA), the only global, member-driven organization dedicated exclusively to advancing the interests of private equity limited partners. 

Under the terms of the agreement, ILPA members will receive discounted access to eVestment’s private markets solution, TopQ. eVestment TopQ gives institutional investors a powerful tool to collect more granular data from managers, automate and standardize track record calculations and gain deeper insight into performance at the portfolio, fund and deal level, to enhance their private equity manager selection decisions. 

The agreement comes at a time when institutional investors are increasingly considering private equity and private markets investment opportunities, while also making clear their desire for more transparency, better benchmarks and more standardized data. In fact, in a recently released eVestment survey of institutional investors and consultants, 60% said they still find it difficult to compare performance across private markets managers.

“Now more than ever, limited partners are seeking quality solutions to optimize their due diligence and monitoring processes,” said Matthew DeMatteis, Director of Research for the ILPA. “We’re pleased to align with eVestment to deliver valuable options that support enhanced transparency to our members.”

eVestment is quickly becoming the preferred platform for the exchange of private markets performance between managers and asset allocators with the launch late last year of the company’s Private Markets Alliance. The Alliance brings together more than a dozen top industry consultants and investors that have united with eVestment to establish a common approach for communicating quantitative and qualitative data in order to truly optimize how this information is collected and analyzed.

“Since our founding in 2000, eVestment has always been focused on the needs of the instititonal investment community, becoming a leader in traditional and hedge fund data and analytics,” said eVestment co-founder and Chief Alliance Officer Heath Wilson. “We're pleased to announce this new partnership and continue to offer value to those investing across asset classes.”

Ullink, the global leading provider of connectivity and electronic trading solutions, is delighted to unveil a partnership with Valemobi, a supplier of technology to the capital markets industry based out of Brazil, to provide turnkey solutions for clients of its Asset and Wealth Management solutions.

BNP Paribas Fund Link aims to make the fund distribution process easier and more efficient, by facilitating the flow of information between fund buyers and sellers thanks to blockchain and smart contract technology. One of the main objectives of the platform is to speed up the onboarding process for both fund buyers and asset managers. Fund buyers using BNP Paribas Fund Link will only have to upload their profile and investor onboarding documents once. This information will then be shared easily with the various management companies on the platform. 

BNP Paribas Fund Link also aims to improve the process of buying and selling funds thanks to an efficient end-to-end trade execution solution relying on embedded business rules and shared information. This will allow for efficient control and transparency of the distribution chain while removing unnecessary delays and reconciliation costs. 

Finally, BNP Paribas Fund Link’s powerful analytics tools will help investors explore fund data to compare and select funds, and fund managers to fine-tune their distribution. 

Joseph Pinto, COO at AXA Investment Managers, said: “We are excited to work with BNP Paribas Securities Services on the development of this new platform. Operational efficiency is a key area for us in an increasingly competitive market environment where pressure on fees keeps rising. We believe that the new technologies used by this platform can significantly enhance our fund distribution process and ensure we are well placed to meet the continued regulatory demand for increased transparency.” 

SWIFT announces the launch of a significant information architecture and visual redesign for its online reference data tool, Bankers World Online. As SWIFTRef’s flagship service, the latest version of Bankers World Online has been designed to heighten customers’ overall navigation and user experience. 

SWIFTRef, the global reference data utility is a highly-secure platform offering the financial industry a single and unique source for the reference data and financial information needed for seamless payments processing, accurate regulatory reporting, counterparty risk analysis and due diligence. The Bankers World Online service includes essential reference data, including all SWIFT BIC codes, national bank sort codes, IBAN (International Bank Account Number) identifiers, global Legal Entity Identifiers (LEI), and more that are used to facilitate international payments and fulfil new reporting requirements. It also includes important financial information from market data vendors and credit rating agencies, including credit ratings, shareholder information, balance sheet information, cash flows, and many more data sets about customers, suppliers and service providers.  

The new-look Bankers World Online has undergone an entire revamp of its user interface, with the addition of improved search fields and seamless navigation for the customer. It has been designed so that professionals can more quickly and easily source the reference data needed to populate domestic, SEPA and international payments correctly, validate identifiers used in regulatory reports and find information to evaluate current and potential counterparty risk. This major overhaul was the result of carefully thought-out cross divisional and customer research, and collaboration between IT, UX and Marketing experts. The redesigning process engaged clients, non-clients and expert teams from SWIFT to feed their input into the design process. 

Hervé Valentin, Head of SWIFTRef, says, “Bankers World Online has a key role to play in achieving our 2020 SWIFTRef growth ambition. Beyond providing key data, we want to offer a great customer experience which will support our clients’ businesses. The new release of Bankers World Online is an important step in achieving this objective. Through a careful design process involving many clients and insight from various SWIFT teams, we can better understand the industry challenges and respond by regularly building improvements into our tools.”

Today FIME reported its central role in the development and rollout of Turkey’s first domestic scheme, TROY (Turkey’s Payment Method). TROY is a strategic initiative supported by all Turkish banks and managed by BKM (Interbank Card Center of Turkey). FIME was selected by BKM in 2015 to provide consultancy and training at the launch of the project. FIME was then engaged to define the scheme’s technical specifications, develop the certification body and process, and define test tools prior to the commercial launch of the new scheme for contact payments in April 2016. This was followed by the successful launch of contactless payments in April 2017. 

FIME’s test tools are qualified, and laboratories accredited, to support Turkish issuing and acquiring members in integrating with the scheme and launching TROY products and services. FIME is also working closely with payment terminal manufacturers and kernel developers to develop and certify TROY-compliant products.

“We decided two years ago that the time was right and FIME treated us like a scheme from the start,” comments Cenk Temiz, Executive Vice President for Card Payment Systems, at BKM. “Its consultancy, training and local support guided us through the whole process and we successfully launched the second phase of the scheme in April. We look forward to building on our close relationship as we work to drive adoption of contactless and, in time, mobile payments in Turkey.” 

“The Turkish market is evolving quickly and the development of a local scheme adds real value to an increasingly sophisticated payments infrastructure,” comments Arnaud Peninon, Vice President, Consulting & Engineering at FIME. “Having been central to the entire project, we are now ideally placed to help issuing and acquiring members to support the scheme. With contact and contactless card payment options already enabled, we are now working with BKM to enable secure mobile contactless payments for Turkish banks and consumers.”

Today Squawker, the platform for sophisticated trading communities to execute hedging and capital optimisation transactions on-exchange, announced the successful completion of the launch phase of its Equity Finance platform, with 6 out of the top 10 global investment banks live, and announced Ian Axe and Derek Bandeen as two new members to its Advisory Board.
 
Chris Gregory, CEO and co-founder, Squawker, comments: “The European Equity Finance market is currently estimated to trade over €2.5 trillion per annum. With six of the top ten banks live and trading through Squawker, we are already seeing some significant trading traffic over the platform. With a further three of the top ten banks close to completing their deployment projects, Squawker has worked hard to provide the essential support that the Equity Finance community has asked us for.”
 
The announcement marks a significant shift for Squawker, the facilitator of hedging and capital optimisation transactions. Designed and developed in partnership with the world’s leading investment banks, Squawker’s new platform provides a central hub for the European Equity Finance community to bring the execution of equity hedge trades on-exchange. The solution provides Equity Finance traders with settlement against the three largest equity CCPs and facilitating compliance with their trade reporting, MiFID II and MiFIR regulatory requirements. In addition, Squawker’s solution overcomes several key operational issues that currently restrict and limit trading in certain markets, such as automatic registration of share ownership in Spain.
 
Ian Axe, the recently-designated CEO of Panmure Gordon, former chief executive of LCH.Clearnet, and previously global head of operations and COO for EMEA at Barclays Capital, and Derek Bandeen, former Global Head of Equities at Citigroup join Squawker’s advisory board.

Ian Axe comments: “The top-tier investment banks are under increasing regulatory pressure for on-exchange transparency and central clearing counterparty (CCP) cleared models across their operations. They are all seeking to implement Straight-Through Processing for Equity Finance to replace the traditional OTC process.”

Derek Bandeen adds: “Squawker’s platform enables the large Equity Finance players to bring their execution of equity hedge trades on-exchange and provides a structure for them to manage their counterparty risk with Central Counterparty clearing.”