From the pot
into the fire...
what do we do next?
Kristian Karppi, Managing Director of K&K Global Consulting
No doubt the regulatory pressure on the
heads of trading is going to remain when we
pass to the “other side” of MiFID II in 2018.
When the tsunami of regulatory last-minute
remediation activities is culminating, we
hope the heads of trading will get time to
shed some light at progressing their business
opportunities instead of spending too
much time on fear driven patching of holes
in the front office governance framework.
Discussions and rumours are already
spreading of the timelines for the regulators
first thematic reviews of the buy-side firms.
Some market participants are already or are
planning to relocate their business activities
to countries where there is a substantial
regulatory arbitrage. We are not surprised to
see some EU countries giving the buy-side
a relief on ‘transaction reporting’ to make
it easier to run their business from their
countries. There is no room for draconian
regulations in a global economy. Ultimately
the end investors and the voting population
Winter 2017
in each country pays for political failures
supporting the finance industry.
On the positive side, we can see the contest
for survival bringing new smart innovations
to the market. Out buy-side participants at
the Alpha Trader Forum (ATF) are already
debating the use of evidence based and
stochastic broker selection based on
improved access to data (page 16), new
and existing block trading initiatives and
evolving broker relationships (page 20) and
how to optimise the relationships with the
investment teams (page 31).
The Alpha Trader Forums during the first
half of 2018 will be infatuated with the
themes “what happened?” and “what do
we do next?”. Obviously, we would like
to calibrate our discussions around how
to progress the industry for the better
of the buy-side trading community and
ultimately the end client.
www.buysideintel.com
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