All equities traded on the Nasdaq Dubai exchange will move over to a new platform starting on June 27, the company said Friday. The move, it said, is a result of the exchange’s acquisition by the Dubai Financial Market. DFM acquired a majority stake in Nasdaq Dubai — known as the Dubai International Financial Exchange until it was acquired by Nasdaq OMX in 2008 — last week. The equities will trade on the DFM’s own X-Stream platform. However, they will continue to be listed on Nasdaq Dubai. Clearing, settlement and custody functions will also move over, but derivatives will continue to be traded on Nasdaq Dubai. “This new structure will create the same look and feel for trading on both of Dubai’s exchanges, which will stimulate … Read more »

Securing corporate IT systems is crucial, but there are ways to make that effort more productive and less costly. Companies have spent years beefing up their information technology governance, risk and compliance systems.  With cutting costs now top of mind in corporate America, here are six ways to make IT GRC systems more productive and less costly. 1. Automate access controls. Today, most companies use a manual process to add users to an application or cancel their accounts. Switching to an automated system can save significant sums and reduce the risks associated with unwanted access. According to an April study by research firm Ponemon Institute, based on responses from more than 700 IT professionals at U.S.-based companies, 87% believe employees have too much access … Read more »

Virtual events platform provider On24 has rolled out a suite of social networking tools this week, including integration with Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. “We have a standard Twitter widget that can be embedded in a virtual event,” said Denise Persson, On24’s chief marketing officer. “You can see the conversation going on by people in the event – or not in the event – and if you want to Twitter, you can log in through that widget and Twitter about the event.” The widget can be customized to filter for a conference-specific Twitter hashtag, or by Twitter user account. “Facebook and LinkedIn can work the same way,” she told Hypergrid Business. In addition, event attendees can use these social networks to find out more information about … Read more »

Goldman Sachs, UBS and Société Générale all have been involved in the last year in high-profile cases involving alleged thefts of computer code used in their algorithmic trading strategies for their clients and their own objectives. The lesson: Even the biggest and best of breed in high-speed, complex electronic trading need to review the procedures they have in place for securing their source code-as well as other valuable trade secrets. “The sophisticated technology that’s allowed these types of trading strategies to proliferate has also made it much more complicated to keep that type of intellectual property from leaving the four walls of financial institutions,” said Kevin McPartland, an analyst at research firm Tabb Group, based in Westborough, Mass. The departures don’t always take sophisticated … Read more »

According to virtual events platform provider InXpo, each visitor to a virtual meetings saves – on average – 1,217 pounds of carbon dioxide. It would take 25 trees a whole year to absorb that much carbon. Airplanes, cars and hotel rooms use a lot more energy than the servers and computers needed to run virtual worlds. For a large corporate conference, the environmental impact could be significant. Take, for example, Cisco’s Global Sales Experience, which 19,000 employees attended virtually last September (full case study here). Yes, the company saved 90 percent of what the conference would have cost if it had been conducted the traditional way — with hotel rooms and airline flights. But the company also saved its employees a total of 334,000 … Read more »

After the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002, many securities firms implemented financial controls to ensure the accuracy of financial statements. The new act required public companies to strengthen accounting controls and financial oversight. Spreadsheets are difficult to control and audit. Many companies accelerated their migration to enterprise-quality databases and resource management systems that could be audited. But spreadsheets still haven’t gone away-and continue to pose compliance problems for securities firms. One of them is Securities America, one of the nation’s largest independent general securities broker-dealers. “We’re in a heavily regulated industry, audited by multiple state and federal agencies,” said David Vaughan, Jr., the firm’s first vice president and controller. “Having accurate financial statements is of the utmost importance.” Unfortunately, Securities America’s use of … Read more »

This year, U.S. regulators plan to tighten leverage requirements and oversight of foreign exchange brokers. Securities firms with operations in the United Kingdom will need to increase liquidity reserves and begin daily monitoring of assets that can be converted easily into cash. Meanwhile, Asian countries continue to implement the Basel II accords, under which institutions that offer banking services must measure and report operational risks. Many more regulatory reforms are in the pipeline, designed to protect the global and national economies from future financial shocks. The challenge: developing a global standard on how to approach the regulation of risk and the reporting associated with it. The biggest difference in international approaches, philosophically, is that of the United States and the United Kingdom, … Read more »

New software products aim to help companies get the whip hand over ubiquitous but risky spreadsheets. Concur Technologies helps companies automate the processes by which they manage employee travel and entertainment spending, but some of its own processes aren’t fully automated. “We’re like everyone,” says Terry DePolo, Concur’s director of accounting. “We’re trying to minimize the number of spreadsheets we rely on. We’re currently on the Oracle 11i system, and it’s just not flexible enough for us to migrate completely off of spreadsheets—and we probably never will.” As a result, finance staffers have to spend time checking that all monthly tasks on spreadsheets have been completed and signed off by a manager. And it wasn’t always clear where spreadsheets were. “We … Read more »