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Conference programme

Day 1:Tuesday 2 December 2008

08.00 – 08.45 Registration and Continental Breakfast


08.45 – 09.00
Opening Remarks 
Mark Austen, Managing Director, Securities Industries and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) 


09.00 – 09.30
View from an Industry CEO: Taking a Flexible Response to Industry Changes.
Competitive forces are re-shaping the face of the European financial markets as never before. Both buy-side and sell-side traders are having to adapt rapidly to a continuously changing environment in which liquidity fragmentation and algorithmic trading is a reality, and the concept of "dark liquidity" and liquidity management are of growing importance, and tools such as smart order routing which just two years ago were unheard of in Europe are now deemed core components of any sell side execution service. Both order and dealer driven markets are all having to re-appraise their business models. In this session, an industry CEO gives his perspective on how to adapt and survive.

Richard Balarkas, President & CEO, Instinet Europe


09.30 – 10.10
Getting More for Less: The View from the Top.

  • How can we leverage technology to reduce costs and increase delivery at the same time?
  • Is it time to invest, integrate, outsource for improved cross-asset services or just cut back?
  • Driving horizontal integration throughout your operations and sharing knowledge between fixed income, equity, FX and derivatives
  • Using IT as an internal consultancy function rather than a monolithic department
  • Should the buyside continue to rely on the sell side for its technology or take more control of their own tools?
  • Practical techniques for establishing a metrics and governance programme tied to IT cost reduction

Panellists:
Iain Craig, Chief Architect of Investment Banking, Credit Suisse
Giancarlo Papetti, Global Systems Strategist, Pioneer Global Asset Mangement

 

10.10 – 10.40
Is the NYSE Euronext Merger a Sign of Things to Come?
Exploring the current environment and what the future holds for exchanges in an increasingly fragmented global market place.

Danny Moore, Co-Chief Executive Officer, NYSE Euronext Advanced Trading Solutions


10.40 - 11.00 Refreshment Break

 

11.00 – 11.45
Panel Debate: Evolving Market Structures: How They Drive Technological Change.

  • Debating the latest innovations from established and new players in the competitive European execution landscape. How have market share and trading patterns changed?
  • Determining how domestic, regional and pan-Atlantic business models are changing in the hunt for liquidity and best execution
  • Creating efficient order management and execution management systems
  • Evaluating the latest developments in order and execution management systems and smart order routing – emerging opportunities from new distribution models.
  • The quest for alpha – dark vs light liquidity pools and new algorithmic trading techniques
  • Low-latency architectures and network technology – strategies for speed in data and execution
  • Evaluating the move towards co-location and its impact on trading strategies
  • The latest in ergonomic and energy efficient productivity tools on the trading floor

Moderator:
Robert Barnes, Managing Director, Equities. UBS

Panellists:
Artur Fischer, Joint CEO, Equiduct Trading
Mark Helmsley, CEO, BATS
Eli Lederman, Chief Executive, Turquoise
Peter Randall, Chief Executive, Chi-x Europe Ltd
Stuart Rutherford, Head of Trading Services, PLUS Markets Group 


11.45 – 12.30
Next Generation Electronic Trading: Globalisation and Technology

  • Tackling the challenges to the industry’s underlying technology infrastructures posed by electronic trading and market data volumes
  • Coping with integration, capacity, latency and stability during a period of increased regulatory requirements
  • Expanding product offerings and focusing on liquidity management, algorithmic trading and multi-asset trading
  • Managing real – time risks across fixed income, equity, credit and FX
  • Debating current hurdles in the market place and offering solutions around managing your trading infrastructure and vendor integration strategies

Moderator:
Tom Middleton, Head of Algorithms, EMEA, Citigroup

Panellists:
Rob Maher, Head of AES Sales Europe, Credit Suisse
Brian Schwieger, Director, Head of Algorithmic Execution, EMEA Execution Services, Merrill Lynch
Chaker Zammouri, Head of IT for Fixed Income Group, Calyon


12.30 - 13.45  Lunch

 

13.45 – 14.15
Operational Risk Management and IT - The Impacts of the Financial Crisis and Regulation

  • Challenges of reacting faster in a faster marketplace
  • Forward-looking impacts and cross-impacts of regulations on IT
  • Achieving operational efficiency with effective risk
    management

Anthony Kirby, Director of Regulatory & Risk Management, Ernst & Young
Chris Pickles, Head of Marketing - Investment Banking & Global Accounts, BT Global Services

14.15 - 14.45
Execution Venues Strategies for Survival - Who Will the Winner be and Why?

Kevin Bourne, Managing Director, Global Head of eEquities, HSBC

14.45 – 15.15 
Real-time Risk Management, Clearing & Settlement. 

Electronic trading and increasingly complex products are driving the need for greater straight through processing and sophisticated modeling in the back office. However, this very automation means a convergence of front and back office operations as positions, risks and compliance need to be updated in real time to orchestrate the distributed, e-services supply chain.

  • How are firms managing the transition to the market fabric of financial eCommerce relationships?
  • What organizational and skills changes are needed to effect the transition?
  • Is there convergence between different back office teams on the buy and sell side or between the front, middle and back office?
  • How does automation impact on supply chain and outsourcing relationships across the different asset classes?
  • What are the key priorities to address?

Ron Tannenbaum, Co – founder, GlobeOp Financial Services and Hedge Fund Client
 

15.15 – 15.45 Refreshment Break

15.45 – 16.15
Creating the Optimal Enterprise Risk Management Framework.
This session will address how the three pillars of risk – Credit risk, market risk , liquidity and operational risk – combine into a holistic Enterprise Risk Management framework. In addition, the current state of risk management capabilities at securities firms in key risk areas: the impact of regulatory imperatives on the development of risk management systems; and the vision for combining disparate systems into an enterprise risk management capability that allows a higher level of security, supervision, liquidity management and capital optimization will also be addressed.

Julio Gomez, CEO, Gomez Markets

 
16.15 - 16.45
eMail Archiving and Management - How to Fight Fog!
eMail is arguably the most important business application that any organization runs, yet bringing control to the email flood, remaining compliant with increasingly unforgiving regulations and making sense of divergent technology solutions to tame the email beast is a near impossible undertaking. Drawing upon current independent and global research, this session will share best and worst practices along with a no holds barred examination and evaluation of the current archiving and management technologies in the marketplace. All financial service organizations have to manage and archive emails, but doing it efficiently and with the right tools currently eludes many.

Alan Pelz-Sharpe, Principal, CMS Watch


16.45 - 17.15
Open Source and Collaborative Development

Open source software continues to spread in an increasingly wide range of application and software engineering use cases. In this session the panellists will address questions such as:

  • Are there no limits to the types of software open to open source?
  • Can open source be seen as a more sophisticated form of interoperability?
  • How do open source support communities help banks to apply new technology more successfully?
  • What are the hot open source products?
  • In what areas should we like to see more open source offerings?


17.20 – 17.30 Chairman’s Closing remarks and Close of Conference Day One

 
17.30 – 19.30 Networking Drinks Reception

 

 

Day Two: Wednesday 3 December 2008

 
08.00 – 08.45 Registration and Continental Breakfast


08.45 – 09.30
Latest Trends in High Performance Computing: Grids, Clouds and Social Networks.

  • Moving from silo based to enterprise grids, sharing infrastructure across trading desks
  • Projecting the impact of new Virtualization technologies on transaction based applications
  • Determining how the growth in social business/communities driven by Web 2.0 business models are changing demands on processing
  • How the increase in e-services will create massive growth in digital data: Driven by the need to access, analyze and act upon this unprecedented volume of data
  • Addressing the impact, characteristics and opportunities of emerging computing infrastructures and platforms:

            - containers

            - cloud computing

            - stateless systems

            - ensembles

            - low power and high density platforms

Moderator:
Dr. Tony K. Chau, Global Chief Architect, Credit, Rates and Emerging Markets, IB Technology, JPMorgan

Panellists:
Ryan Bagnulo, Founder and Innovation Architect, ASPECT - i, Formerly Wachovia CIB Head of Architecture & Innovation
Andrew Graham, Lead Client IT Architect, IBM 
Jeff Wierer, Group Product Manager, Windows Server Team, Microsoft


9.30 – 10.15
What Low Latency Really Means to You and Your Organisation?

  • Measuring low latency’s impact on the entire trade process – from front – to back-office
  • How do the sources of latency differ for market makers vs flow traders on the sell and buy side? Do their calibration and tuning strategies differ as well?
  • Optimal ways for identifying and prioritizing areas for infrastructural improvement
  • Mastering the algorithmic arts of managing probability heat maps and forecasting queue dynamics
  • Building real time market models and visualisations for liquidity management while tracking, cross asset and cross-market correlations
  • Evaluating how poor latency results in lost opportunities

Moderator:
Adam Sussman, Director of Research, TABB Group

Panellists:
Robert Boardman, Head of Algorithmic Trading Sales, ITG
Tom Middleton, Head of Algorithms, EMEA, Citi
Peter Sharp, Head of Market Data, Europe, Morgan Stanley

 


10.15 – 11.00
Another Paradigm Shift: How SOA and Extreme Processing Technologies Can Open Up the Grid to More than Analytics & Risk.
This session will address how Service oriented architectures (SOA), complex event processing (CEP) and data fabrics are all being used to support a new generation of data and model driven architectures (MDA). Questions that will be answered include:

  • How do these technologies integrate to enable IT alignment with the new business realities?
  • Do we need to re-engineer our OMS/EMS and ticker plant systems to survive the exponential growth in volumes and complexity of the markets
  • Can they facilitate agile e-outsourcing, and if so, how?

Moderator:
Ryan Bagnulo, Founder and Innovation Architect, ASPECT - i, Formerly Wachovia CIB Head of Architecture & Innovation

Panellists:
Yomi Abatan, Enterprise Architect, Deutsche Bank
Iain Craig, Chief Architect of Investment Banking, Credit Suisse
Dipen Mehta, Chief Architect, Financial Markets, Standard Chartered Bank

 

11.00 – 11.20 Refreshment Break

 

11.20 – 11.50
Assessing How Semantic Technologies Open a New Chapter on Data Overload.
Semantic web is all about machine-readable content either through natural language processing (NLP), XML wrappers or similar technologies. NLP strategies are generating elementised news, which can be actioned directly by your algos. NLP can also be used to enhance web search engines or classify text databases. XML wrappers enable services to be dynamically discovered and engaged to meet evolving requirements. This session debates the state of the art of these important technologies and asks: Are they ready for prime time?

Rob James, Architecture Domain Head for Methods and previously the Information Architect for Global Banking and Markets, HSBC 

 

11.50 – 12.20
The Multi-dimensional World of Supercomputers: Ready for Mainstream?
Silicon accelerators may be bigger, faster and cheaper but, while speed is important but there are other dimensions to consider. The University of Reading has been evaluating advanced financial mathematics of real time risk and pricing, using the UK’s second fastest supercomputer, the IBM Blade Runner with Cell Broadband Engines on board. Professor Alexandrov will reveal the practical implications of this important research for financial markets and focus on key issues such as:

  • Transcending the teraflop barrier – how fast is fast?
  • Managing algos with a short shelf life: the challenge of software maintenance
  • Evaluating the economics of the right environment and technology
  • Understanding the relationship to grid, Web 2.0, collaboratories etc
  • Surfing the data flood: how to visualize high velocity markets and avoid the traditional bottlenecks
  • Improving computational efficiency with scalable algorithms and parallel execution
  • Tuning the software: getting the right balance and trade-offs
  • Moving to the fourth dimension: ensuring trading advantage by really thinking outside the box

Professor Vassil Alexandrov, Director, Centre for Advanced Computing and Emerging Technologies (ACET), University of Reading

12.20 - 13.00
Managing the IT Impact of the OTC Derivatives Revolution.
The complexity of OTC derivatives continues to grow as more and more utilities for affirmations, portfolio reconciliations, third party valuations, collateral management, and life cycle warehouses compete for business. At the same time exchange traded OTC products and clearing houses are finally beginning to take off as well. The panel will discuss this topic and answer the following questions:

  • What difference will eTrading and the new clearing houses make?
  • Will automation be able to keep pace with innovation? If so, how?
  • How are firms managing to juggle all the e-commerce relationships with different symbologies and messaging standards?
  • How do you manage risk in such a distributed environment given the unsettled market conditions and changing regulatory contexts?
  • What role, if any, do eCommerce and STP have to play in this highly complex world?


Moderator:
Chris Sims, Head of Investment Operations, Gartmere Investment Mangement

Panellists:
Chaker Zammouri, Head of IT for Fixed Income, Calyon
Matt Simpson, Associate Director, Enterprise Architecture, CME Group


13:00 - 14:00    Lunch 

 
14.00 – 14.45
Managing the Rapid Increase in Market Data and Ensuring Data Consistency.

  • Debating how increased volatility and automation are straining system capacity across the asset classes and trading styles
    - market data ticker plant perspective
    - transaction processing perspective
  • Market data and trading strategies
  • European and global market statistics
  • New techniques for measuring growth
  • Pinpointing possible solutions: what short and long term planning is required to cope with the volume on the sell and buy side?
  • Changing role in market data management

Moderator:
Thomas J. Jordan, President & CEO, JORDAN & JORDAN

Panellists:
Ian Williams, Global Head of Market Information Business Management, Credit Suisse
Shirley White, Global Market Data Manager, Global Market Division, Deutsche Bank AG 


14.45 - 15.00
Finding a Technology Roadmap for the Future: Closing Remarks.
Drawing on the earlier presentations, the panel will try to draw some conclusions about the state of the European technology ‘market fabric’ of financial e-commerce relationships in its time of trial and what needs to be done to facilitate its growth in a sustainable way

  • How can sell and buy side firms exploit the power of the multi-asset e-services that exist? What infrastructure roles are missing or could be improved to facilitate the digital economy?
  • How are e-services changing the rules of the game? How do we control the risks of ever faster, ever smarter trading and operations?
  • What are the key priorities for 2009 to make Europe a financial market leader for e-trading and to help rebuild the international financial system?

Bob Giffords, Independent Banking Consultant


15.20 – 15.30 Chairman’s Closing Remarks and Close

If you are interested in speaking at the event, please contact Malou Lindholm at mlindholm@sifma.org or call +44 (0)20 7743 9321.