LENDING TRANSPARENCy
What should custodian
banks and plan sponsors
tell each other?
MONDAy MONITOR
Only on securitiesindustry.com
HOW WALL STREET OPERATES
Volume 22 number 4 • February 22, 2010
UPTICK p. 3
Facing Up to Social Networks
TRADING p. 6
Streaming Prices to Debt Buyers
RULES p. 16
Compliance, Before the Trade
LAST WORD p. 23
The Glory of Transaction Processing
Syndicated
Loans Market
Embraces
Automation
EXCHANGEREPORT
Case Symbolizes
Dangers of Not
Protecting Code
By Chris Kentouris
Once relying entirely
on paper documents to process
trades, the syndicated loans
market used to be considered
error-prone and costly.
But the $1.5 trillion dol-
lar market is quickly catching
up to its equities and fixed-
income peers in automating
communications and post-
trade functions.
the latest initiative: Markit
group’s announcement it ac-
quired two syndicated loan
automators over the past
month. last week it purchased
the technology assets—aka,
the computers and intellec-
tual property—of Storm net-
works. in January, it completed
the purchase of Storm’s com-
petitor clearPar from Fidelity
information Services.
“the need for automation
in syndicated loans has become
important as the risks and in-
efficiencies become costly for
agent banks and lenders,” says
JOe PAgAnO inSiStS tHAt
he is looking forward to work
in the months ahead as “Mi-
crosoft has never released
more value in its platforms for
financial service firms than it
has with the current wave.” CONTINUED ON PAGE 12
PhONES FIND
NEW CALLING
Phones—and instant
messaging—are
staging a comeback
in the options market.
their use: Finding
dark pools of
capital, for
large orders.
STORy ON PAGE 8
Microsoft Pivots to Deliver More Data, Faster
securitiesindustry.com • A SourceMedia brand
that value comes from
products that appeared late
last year and others—such
as Microsoft Of-
fice 2010—to be
released in the first
half of 2010.
these include
PowerPivot for excel 2010 – a
feature of the new Microsoft
Office—and .net Frame-
work 4.0, used in concert with
Visual Studio 2010.
the first release “is a big
deal,” Pagano says, because
PowerPivot will enable analy-
sis of massive data sets from
virtually any data format down
to the desktop, allowing finan-
cial firms to make better deci-
sions far faster and at lower
cost. the latter
product—a .net
extension—facili-
tates the extremely
complex task of
programming multiple threads
of instructions that run simul-
taneously on multiple core
processors in racks of trading
servers. these multi-thread,
multi-core workloads more
readily achieve the low laten-
cies and high trading volumes
that financial firms seek.
CONTINUED ON PAGE 14
By Chris Kentouris
yOur cOMPAny HAS SPent
years developing a software
program. it licenses its soft-
ware to some of the financial
industry’s biggest names. the
firm even obtains a copyright
for its software and signs
what it thinks are airtight
contracts.
you think you have just
achieved the American dream
and nothing can go wrong,
right? not exactly. you have to
protect your dream first.
A lawsuit filed on Feb. 3
by SFB Market Systems, a
thorofare, n.J.-based software
firm specializing in managing
options symbology against the
seven u.S. options exchanges
and the chicago-based Op-
tions clearing corp. provides
a glaring example of just what
can go wrong. And it offers les-
sons for how a software devel-
CONTINUED ON PAGE 10
Barometer of Wall Street’s Health
Fin5oindex
994.40
; 49.52
; 5.2%
FeB. 4 to Feb. 18, 2010
See Page 22
