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Chris Pickles

Chris Pickles - BT - London | 25/03/2013 | 1946 views | 3 comments

Watching how data volumes coming out of the Chicago derivatives markets have been growing is what you do when you have to build IT infrastructure to support a modern bank or broker anywhere in the world. Moore’s Law, where processors double in power every 18 months, becomes a practical bottleneck, because the world isn’t governed by Mo... Tags: Trade execution, Post-trade & ops

Chris Pickles - BT - London | 22/03/2013 | 1405 views | 1 comment

25 years of the German Exchange

Sometimes it’s useful to remember how things were so that we can work out how we got to where we are today. 25 years ago Germany had eight separate securities exchanges, of which Dusseldorf was the largest, and it had no derivatives exchanges – in fact, derivatives trading was classed in the same regulatory category as gambling, but wi... Tags: Trade execution, Post-trade & ops

Chris Pickles - BT - London | 06/02/2013 | 1886 views | 1 comment

Proving best-execution compliance for all trades

Despite the growth of automated, electronic trading – whether high-speed or algorithmic or plain vanilla – voice trading is still a key element of markets in most asset classes, and in particular where trades need to be negotiated. We’d all expect firms to keep archives of all electronic transactions, as with all of their compute... Tags: Trade execution, Risk & regulation

Chris Pickles - BT - London | 04/02/2013 | 1765 views | 2 comments

Who pays a transaction tax?

One sometimes wonders how distanced politicians are from commerce, business and financial services. There is the impression that they have a desire to punish financial institutions for actions that led to the global economic crash and to the current and ongoing global economic crisis – or at least for their actions that didn’t stop dis... Tags: Trade execution, Post-trade & ops

Chris Pickles - BT - London | 30/01/2013 | 1608 views | 1 comment

Payments and the Eurozone

I’m in the Netherland today, talking to financial institutions about Payments. Since the Euro was introduced in the EU, the challenge for payment processors has been pretty clear: how do you become the lowest-cost processor of Euro-denominated payments in the world? Standardisation across multiple countries creates opportunities and threats... Tags: Mobile & online, Payments