Citi announced today the release of its completely redesigned Citi Mobile® App for iPhone® in the U.S. The new app for consumer banking and credit card customers enables the use of the Touch ID feature on iPhone devices, integrates with Apple Watch™ and adds new features responding to customer feedback and changing behaviors.

 Fidessa group plc (LSE: FDSA) today announced the launch of its new low-latency DMA platform that provides brokers with high-performance, scalable and consistent access to global equity and derivatives markets. Built on Fidessa’s latest next-generation technology and delivered as a managed service, the platform helps firms reduce cost and improve efficiency by outsourcing the commoditized aspects of their market access infrastructure.

This is the first service to emerge from Fidessa’s Electronic Execution business, headed by David Polen, which focuses on technology to support brokers in delivering the low-touch, global, multi-asset execution capabilities that their clients are demanding.

Increasingly client order flow is routed through low-touch execution channels and yet brokers still struggle to provide a globally consistent service, especially across multiple asset classes. Those firms that do manage to achieve this are still challenged by the cost of owning and maintaining the entirety of their infrastructure and technology stack.

David Polen, Global Head of Electronic Execution at Fidessa, comments: “In Europe alone there were 175 markets registered at the end of 2007 and this has risen to around 280 today. Including the 60 or so markets that have come and gone in-between, that's more than 160 new venues – nearly double in just seven years. Just managing the mandatory upgrades across these markets is a resource-intensive overhead for any firm. In the US, the picture is further complicated by the existence of hundreds of different order types, while in Asia firms struggle with multiple trading and regulatory regimes. Keeping abreast of all this is an expensive proposition for brokers. And one that does not differentiate their service."

The new low-latency DMA platform insulates clients from the ever-changing global trading landscape, allowing them to focus on innovation in their own business. Besides low-latency market access, the new service also includes sophisticated frameworks around SOR, internalization, algo trading and risk management. These can all be seamlessly integrated into a firm's own systems and are available as a complete service or as separate modules, enabling them to offer a tailored, differentiated service to their own clients in the most cost-efficient manner.

"Central to the managed service is Fidessa's new global infrastructure that will underpin all our sell-side products", continues Polen. "It is hosted in co-lo and proximity datacenters around the world and delivered through dedicated, private infrastructure allowing complete control and fine-tuning of the hardware and connectivity to offer the optimum levels of service. As a result, we are able to provide a combination of functionality and performance that other vendors are simply unable to match – all managed and monitored in real-time and backed up by stringent SLAs and KPIs."

Fidessa's new low-latency DMA platform has been built in response to demand from brokers for consistent access to global markets based on a normalized trading interface and simple integration with their own systems. The service has been successfully piloted with clients in the US, Asia and Europe.

More than three-quarters of financial advisors are using ETFs in their investment strategies. This is the highest number in history, according to Advisor Intelligence - the industry’s most comprehensive intelligence tool for asset managers to understand the investment approaches of financial advisors.

Advisor Intelligence reveals industry trends on advisor use of mutual funds and ETFs. Advisor use of fund products is changing. According to Broadridge and Cogent Reports data:

·         The RIA channel is the strongest user of ETFs, while the independent broker-dealer channel is the largest user of actively managed mutual funds

·         More advisors are selling ETFs – 76% are doing so, up from 68% two years ago 

·         Overall, ETF assets under management are up $167 billion year-to-date as of May 31

·         New products like smart beta ETFs are increasingly attractive to advisors, especially in the retail channels driven by advisors

·         Advisors are increasingly driving mutual fund sales for small and medium defined contribution plan business

“As the financial services industry becomes more specialized, and asset fee-based advisors drive the growth of assets under management, the need for market segmentation and targeted sales is more important than ever,” said Frank Polefrone, senior vice president of Broadridge’s Access Data product suite. “Through our partnership with Cogent, we’ve combined product information with ongoing market research to not only identify the products that advisors are likely to buy, but also the best way to engage with the advisor to close sales.”

Advisor Intelligence, a unique tool created by Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc. (NYSE:BR) and Cogent Research, a division of Market Strategies International, links three critical types of information not commonly available through a single source: product data, firm profiles, and attitudinal preferences - giving asset managers the ability to pinpoint their marketing and sales activities to support advisors.

Advisor Intelligence transforms raw data and adds behavior insights to create a breakthrough capability for asset managers to understand what trades are occurring, where and how their products are being sold, and the communication preferences of advisors who are selling them. The new application combines Broadridge fund and ETF data with Cogent’s advisor segmentation data to generate powerful profiles of more than 250,000 advisors nationwide.

“Until now, approaches to advisor segmentation have tended to be quite broad in nature,” said John Meunier, managing director, Cogent Reports. “This partnership combines trading information in our behavior models to improve the predictability of key segments, to more efficiently build the bridge between asset managers and advisors.”

 BBVA Group has entered a multi-year agreement with Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc. (NYSE: BR) for a post-trade Managed Service to support its institutional fixed income business in the U.S. BBVA becomes one of more than two dozen clients to adopt Broadridge's North American Managed Service, an industry-leading utility model that enables BBVA to expand its product offering and gain significant trade processing and cost savings and enhance its risk controls.

Under the agreement, Broadridge will provide an integrated Managed Service to support fixed income and repurchase agreement processing, international clearance and settlement and investor communications services. Broadridge has supported reconciliations processing of equities, cash and exchange-traded derivatives for BBVA since 2013.

"As the fixed income market evolves, new technology and operating models will play an increasingly vital role for our business," said Ramon Martinez Sobrado, Head of CIB Global Operations for BBVA Group. "The strategy to move to Broadridge's Managed Service model enables BBVA to leverage significant scale and cost efficiencies to gain competitive differentiation for our U.S. institutional fixed income business. The expanded relationship with Broadridge is part of our strategy to deliver superior services to our clients while enhancing our core technologies and efficiencies."

"BBVA has long distinguished itself on the basis of operational and technology excellence," said Michael Alexander, president, Wealth and Capital Markets Solutions, Broadridge. "This expanded relationship will help the bank transform and streamline its institutional fixed income operation at a time when new models and technology can help set a path for the industry's future winners. We are delighted to support BBVA in this strategic program."

Broadridge's technology supports post-trade processing for 60 percent of all U.S. fixed income trading volumes, including 16 of the 22 U.S. primary dealers. It provides equities processing for six of the 10 largest global investment banks, and processes more than $5 trillion in U.S. equity and fixed income trades per day. Broadridge's Managed Service provides an innovative and rapidly growing outcomes-based service model. It handles approximately 16 percent of all U.S. institutional fixed income volumes, representing a doubling in volumes over the past year.

Thomson Reuters, the world’s leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals, announced today the introduction of the Elektron API  family, a set of open-source Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that simplify access to Thomson Reuters data feeds and services, and help developers to innovate by creating their own customised applications. The Elektron API family consists of a broad set of interfaces ranging from low latency/high performance to simple content aware and web APIs.

End users of financial data are increasingly setting the agenda in the types of data they access and how they use it based on their individual needs. This reflects a growing trend in the financial services industry towards agile, connected and open models as powerful growth drivers.

The Elektron API family provides an easy-to-use, single point of access to Thomson Reuters Elektron content delivered by Elektron Real Time as well as content delivered using Thomson Reuters Enterprise Platform (TREP), which can include third party content. The availability of the new APIs under an open source license enables developers to extend the APIs to access multiple data sources and systems through a single API stack.  This helps them to be more agile and innovative whilst potentially lowering total ownership costs.  In this way, the Elektron API family opens the flow of content and connectivity for users without compromising class leading delivery.

“Open access to data is driving innovation in the technology industry by simplifying the processes developers use to access, explore and create,” said Brennan Carley, head of platform and analytics, Financial & Risk, Thomson Reuters. “The Elektron API family was designed to meet the changing needs of market participants by supporting innovation and collaboration, helping drive profitable and sustainable financial markets in an effective, user-friendly way.”

“The financial industry is undergoing unprecedented transformation”, said Sang Lee, co-founder and managing partner, Aite Group.  “To succeed, firms need to have the flexibility to adapt quickly to changing circumstances and seize new opportunities.  This means that service providers in their turn need to offer easier and more open tools to enable agile application development, and to provide developers with open standards that can access many sources of content.”

Users of the Elektron API family will also have access to one of the largest developer and partner communities in the financial industry, helping to increase the level of productivity, collaboration and innovation across a broad ecosystem, with Thomson Reuters acting as anchor firm.  Through on-going development and community enhancement, Thomson Reuters intends to support and build on the APIs over time.

The Elektron API family builds on a history of market data innovation at Thomson Reuters, which was the first vendor to support completely open market data architectures with the Thomson Reuters Enterprise Platform and its predecessors. The Elektron APIs were developed with active engagement and feedback from Thomson Reuters customers, including five of the top global banks.

 Although 73 percent of respondents to a recent Reval survey of more than 200 finance professionals report that they have already centralized control in payments management, 70 percent indicate they will centralize further in 2015. Reval, the leading global provider of a scalable cloud platform for Treasury and Risk Management (TRM), conducted the survey in the first quarter of 2015 to financial professionals in EMEA, North America and APAC.

“Over the past years, many treasuries have moved to central payment structures to reduce idle cash and prevent fraud," says Günther Peer, Vice President at Reval. "While laggards are still struggling with cash visibility, pioneers are already implementing more sophisticated concepts like payment factories or in-house banks. That´s where the big savings are."

According to the Reval survey, finance professionals feel they could significantly reduce transaction costs and bank fees by further centralizing payments management. More advanced technology is necessary to realize these savings, and according to the survey, every second treasury is planning to invest in its payment IT infrastructure over the next 12 months. "Cloud-based treasury systems can help centralization of payments management and increase visibility and efficiency," says Peer. 

For more information, download the Slide Deck "The Big Push to Centralize Payments"

INDATA, a leading industry provider of software and services for buy-side firms, today announced that Palo Capital, an investment advisor based in Newport Beach, CA, has selected INDATA’s iPM EpicÒ platform for their front-to-back office needs.

The industry’s first investment management platform specifically designed for the era of big data, INDATA’s iPM Epic system was selected over competing systems because of the strength of its portfolio modeling, reconciliation and compliance capabilities, especially the system’s ability to capture a complete audit trail of all investment and operational events.

As a front-to-back office client, Palo Capital will be using the iPM Epic system on a fully integrated basis for a range of functions including portfolio accounting, performance, reporting, billing, automated reconciliation, portfolio modeling, trade order management and fully integrated compliance (pre-trade, post-trade, and real-time).

“Investment firms are increasingly not only looking to streamline their investment processes, but also their data management capabilities, and with a multitude of different regulatory bodies and jurisdictions around the world all requiring different information, it is also becoming essential to have a system which can harmonize data flows both internally and externally,” commented David J. Csiki, President, INDATA. “Our iPM Epic solution will help provide a streamlined process to Palo Capital and we are pleased to have been selected as their enterprise investment management system.”

 At a ceremony here this month, Reval accepted awards alongside clients Cigna and eBay, which were highly commended for Harnessing the Power of Technology and Best Risk Management Solution, respectively. For Reval, recognition with Treasury Today magazine’s Adam Smith Awards follows a win earlier this year for Best Corporate Risk Management Solution in Global Finance magazine’s 2015 Best Treasury and Cash Management Providers awards.

“Cigna is honored to have received the Adam Smith technology award for our global transformation project,” says Scott Lambert, Treasury Senior Director in Cigna’s Treasury Department, which is using capabilities from across the full spectrum of treasury and risk management functionality on the Reval Cloud Platform. “We wanted to leverage software-as-a-service technology as much as possible to more easily standardize everyone on the same platform, share data, and achieve visibility and control. When we looked to automate a standard process for cash forecasting, we felt the dynamic cash flow forecasting capabilities enabled us to save time and lower idle cash.”

eBay’s collaboration with Reval helped shape the industry’s best practice reporting for EMIR compliance. “The sheer volume of trades and the related details that needed to be reported would have made gathering the necessary information a daunting task,“ says Debdatta Banerjee, Senior Manager of eBay’s Treasury Operations and Controls. “If we had not leveraged the foreign exchange capabilities we already had in place with Reval, the task would have been insurmountable. We are happy that the industry recognizes our accomplishments and that other companies will benefit from the EMIR capabilities we developed with Reval.”  

Finance professionals can read more details about the award-winning projects in Treasury Today’s upcoming Adam Smith Award Yearbook, which will be published mid-July. According to Treasury Today, 210 entries were received from companies of various sizes and industries across 23 countries. Judges sought companies demonstrating innovation, creativity, outstanding insight, thinking 'outside the box' and real business impact. 

“We are thrilled for Cigna and eBay and appreciate the acknowledgement of their work to advance the industry,” says Reval´s Chief Marketing Officer and EVP of Corporate Strategy Justin Brimfield. “Reval remains dedicated to helping corporate treasuries tackle their challenges, especially as it benefits the entire community of users on the Reval Cloud Platform.”

Standardization of banking supervision is driving change across the banking industry globally, especially standardization in financial reporting, measurement and management. These initiatives have been steadily expanding the regulatory burden on banks and increasing the cost of regulatory compliance. The Ardmore Banking Advisors and Fintellix alliance was created to address the need for a comprehensive solution that can help community banks more easily manage their regulatory compliance matters, and enable bank management to focus on business growth and profitability.

Since 2006, Fintellix has been providing software solutions based on next generation technology to help progressive banks across Asia, Europe, Middle East and Africa leverage their data to enable growth and automate regulatory compliance. Fintellix has emerged as a global banking regulation expert having enabled regulatory compliance transformation for over 30 banks in 12 countries and 4 continents, including the overseas operations of 2 top US banks.

For over 25 years, Ardmore Banking Advisors (“Ardmore”) has assisted hundreds of community banks through the delivery of credit review, strategic and risk consulting, and more recently stress testing, credit portfolio management and ALLL methodology. Ardmore’s founder and leadership team have previously served at the executive level in leading community banks and are deeply committed to helping strengthen the community banking system.

The Fintellix - Ardmore partnership is a unique ‘global/local’ alliance that combines global expertise, local experience, and next generation solutions to lower the cost of compliance for community banks. Through this alliance, Ardmore offers to community banks a CECL-ready ALLL solution powered by a comprehensive credit data warehouse as Software as a Service (SaaS). Ardmore’s seasoned credit professionals ensure that the ALLL solution is tailored for each bank’s specific needs and business model.

Anup Pai, COO of Fintellix comments: "In today’s globalized world, small banks can learn from the experience of larger banks as well as those in other geographies who have already complied with guidelines they are currently faced with. Such adoption of best practices has enabled our customers to reduce the cost of compliance by over 50%. We understand that only global expertise is not enough – a deep understanding of how banking is conducted locally is very important. We are very pleased to partner with Ardmore Banking Advisors – a blue-chip expert in solutions for community banks, to provide this local expertise."

TA (“Sandy”) Spratt, founder & CEO of Ardmore Banking Advisors added: “Our guiding principle has always been to provide value for our clients through long term customer relationships. We’ve invested almost a year to assist Fintellix to ensure their solution is a good fit for US community banks. What impressed us was Fintellix’s depth of experience and forward thinking that enables collaboration between credit and finance in the ALLL process. We are enthusiastic about how this advanced solution will assist the community banking market.”