A new face at Rule is that of LARRY MINDEL, leader of the company’s new Payments practice. Larry has previously held leadership positions with IBM, JP Morgan, Royal Bank of Canada, Gemini Consulting, Capco and EDS. He’s a specialist in business transformation – merging banks, transforming their banking operations, devising and implementing new sourcing strategies, and developing the organisations and their people. Rule’s Payments practice will focus on helping banks put the most appropriate operating models in place.

     “Banks are facing major issues - and opportunities - as Payments forces its way up the corporate agenda.” says Larry. “The impact of SEPA (the Single Euro Payments Area), even outside the Eurozone, together with recent innovations in business and commercial models, and a new breed of cross-product Payments platform, are all changing the way banks operate. Key decisions need to be made now on market positioning, operating models, transformation routes, sourcing strategy and technology platforms. We’re already seeing the impact in the market: firms which don’t act will lose out.”

     Larry believes Rule is ideally placed to help banks make and implement these important decisions. “Along with our class-leading change management capability, we have a great reputation for objectivity and giving the best advice. Focusing on Payments is a natural addition to our service set, building on success we’ve already achieved in the areas of SEPA, Faster Payments and Wholesale Banking settlements. It makes us an ideal partner for maximising the opportunity, building platforms for the future and reducing the risks in fundamental change.  After all, payments are the operational heartbeat of any bank.”

Rule Financial hosted a seminar at the City of London Club last month where leading members of the City’s collateral management community gathered to hear guest speakers compare experiences and enjoy rooftop refreshments on a delightful May evening - just before the last mini-heatwave before this one broke.

Michael Cyrus, Co-Managing Director of Credit and Equity Collateral Financing at RBS gave an insightful presentation on the front office perspective on collateral trading citing five notable trends, while Andrew Grant, Lead Business Architect for Risk Control at UBS, spoke on “Collateral - Risk Mitigation or Reward Generation” delivering the powerful mesage that banks need to change the way they use the collateral with which they’re entrusted.

David Little, Head of Rule Financial’s Securities Finance practice, then introduced the maturity model his team has developed, and explained how it can highlight the challenges a bank would face in in moving its collateral management function from a traditional cost position to a thriving profit centre.

David Field, Rule’s MD, concluded the formal presentation and Q&A session by proposing that a survey be undertaken of just where individual banks and funds believe themselves to be on the collateral management maturity model, by benchmarking various elements of their operations against their peers, an idea taken up with interest by delegates and now in development at Rule.

To download the White Paper and slide presentations of Collateral Management: Beyond the Crunch please click here.

The move team, led by Finance Director Patrick Gracey, featured Michael Wood (Project Manager) and Rob Collins (IT) who were aided by other Rule staff along with the fit-out contractors Logic and the removals firm Universal. Briefed to achieve the relocations with the minimum of disruption, it proved a long but ultimately successful weekend, with an extraordinary quantity of furniture and general office equipment moving in a relatively orderly manner across a quarter of a mile of the City of London.

The move comes as a result of a combination of spectacular growth over last year and the end of our current leasing arrangements. The new office, which is also on the 4th floor of the building, features an atrium and will accomodate the growing numbers of permanent and contracted staff who make up Rule’s increasingly strong City presence.

Our new address: 101 Moorgate, London. EC2M 6SL

The logistics of the move, designed to effect a seamless shift in location over a single weekend, with the minimum disruption to Rule Financial’s operations on any of our clients’ business, have been in planning since January.

Harrison returns to the Securities Finance arena after a 3-year sabbatical following the sale of Martini to Sungard.

Announcing the appointment, Rule Financial’s Head of Securities Finance, David Little, commented:-
      “Matthew brings with him a breadth of experience and solid expertise in all aspects of securities financing. There’s no doubt he’ll be a great asset to us.”

         Harrison, the one-time Head of Global repo IT at Deutsche Bank, added  “Rule’s consultants are at the forefront of both the technical and business innovations in securities finance. It will be a pleasure to join this dynamic team, and I look forward to helping clients maximise their securities finance returns”.

The system we’re developing will handle every derivative trade across multiple asset classes, and every traded loan in the bank, as well as many of the cash trades.
At any one time this can be more than 3 million trades per day, with monitoring of every significant event in the lifecycle of a trade: amendments, confirmations, payments, cancellations and maturities.
The objective of the project is to achieve a significant reduction in regulatory capital. To achieve this our client has to convince the regulators that…

• Their advanced models for the calculation of future exposures are correct
• That they have control of the data that is input to the risk engines, which means it’s a complete data set and correctly classified.

One added benefit of the system is that by running the RWA calculation more frequently the Bank can manage the RWA cash buffer more efficiently and achieve significant savings in funding costs.

The system collects derivative trade data directly from the Front Office systems, validates it, enriches it and transforms it, before sending it down to the risk engines, all in STP-mode. The system is made aware of the numbers of trades expected by the risk engines by “learning” the content of the feeds.

The system maintains a repository of all the open trades in the bank for the duration of their life. In the case of Interest Swaps that can be as long as 30 years. This helps satisfy the data control element of the regulations. The data publication mechanism creates a map of the data that is relevant for the business day (that which is aligned with the daily P&L), and hands this map over to the Risk Engines, so that they can “pull” the data from the repository as and when they need it.” 

Justin Richards

At Rule’s regular half-yearly evening meeting hosted in the elegant surroundings of the National Liberal Club at 1, Whitehall Place, CEO and founder Marcus Rule presented figures confirming that the company has added 42 new permanent staff in the last six months alone, thanks to buoyant City trading and increasing recognition of Rule Financial’s ability to service the needs of its blue chip client portfolio.

“Despite the occasional readjustment, business is generally booming in the Square Mile, which gives us the chance to show just how good we are.” explained Marcus. “We’ve got the best people on board, and we’re adding more of them each month. The only barrier to further growth is finding people of the right quality.”

Following the opening presentation, Management Consultant Rachel Andrew from Rule’s Technical Consulting division, spoke on how the company is seeking to position itself as the “Employer of Choice” among the higher echelons of banking consultancy.  She emphasised that a definition of success was when the best clients wanted you to work for them, and the best brains wanted to work for you. Rachel also spoke about the company’s growing contingent of Russian consultants, many now with families in the UK, who constitute Rule’s “Russian Club” (See news story)

Other presentations were given by Head of Business Consulting Dr. Michael Gordon, who summed up his first 100 days at Rule with  a “6P” mnemonic covering People, Processes, Propositions, Promotion, Performance and Predictions, and a Rule Green Team of David Little and Zoë Condon who outlined plans to achieve Carbon Neutrality by 2008, to the booming strains of Richard Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra, the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Heady stuff.

                       Hullo everybody . My name is Hal.

This recognition follows Rule’s successful implementation of Beauchamp systems in four European hedge funds, with several more currently in progress. Rule consultants’ roles have included defining clients’ requirements, managing development and installation, coordinating training needs and providing on-going support. Rule also oversees complex, large scale upgrades which require strong project management and operational support. The ‘Partner’ role also includes implementing customised electronic trading platforms and FIX connectivity.

Beauchamp CPP/Implementation partners are taken through an intense training course covering the intricacies of the hedge fund industry and detailed knowledge of Beauchamp’s functionality, installation and configuration. To date, seven Rule hedge fund consultants have successfully qualified.

Sebastian Kent, COO of Beauchamp, explained “Recent explosive growth in high volume electronic trading has led to our customers demanding ever greater levels of transaction speed and accuracy, with implications for subsequent reporting and archiving. Rule has been helping us meet those needs for our clients and make sure they’re getting the maximum possible benefit from our software.”

Steve Swindon, Head of Rule’s Hedge Fund practice confirmed that Beauchamp and Rule have a longstanding and successful relationship. “Our consultants offer the very highest standards of expertise and domain knowledge, and we feel very appreciative of Beauchamp’s patronage.” he said. “I look forward to working with them for many projects to come.”

To learn more about Linedata Services and the Beauchamp software suite please visit http://www.ldsam.com/global_product_list.html

Hong Kong’s securities watchdog has committed itself to simplifying the licensing requirements for overseas hedge fund managers looking to set up in the former British colony.

Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) said the changes include speeding up the licensing process for some U.S. and UK-registered hedge fund managers, and exempting some staff at hedge funds from having to take exams.
Hong Kong is home to more hedge fund assets than any other Asian city, but a growing number of hedge fund managers are choosing to set up in Singapore, where authorities have tried to attract newcomers with less stringent regulation.

The Hong Kong regulator said that firms already licensed or registered in the USA or Britain will “benefit from an expedited licensing process”, assuming they only serve professional investors and have good compliance records.

It added that staff nominated to be the “responsible officers” of hedge fund firms can also be exempted from the local regulatory examination if they fulfil the necessary criteria: a broad range of industry experience will be recognised as satisfying the competence requirements.

Source: Reuters

 

Blue Riband Rabobank, from left to right: Darren Smith, Dave Taylor, James Matthews, Sarah Bailey, Ella Kempster, Kerry Peacock, and Jason Millard.

A fiendishly talented team from Rule’s clients Rabobank are celebrating their greatly improved performance at this year’s Microsoft UK Challenge event.

Careful study of the photograph above shows that having a Rule Financial logo stitched to your trouser leg is just the thing when competing in gruelling mental and physical contests in the Yorkshire countryside. As “Challenge virgins” in 2006 they came 111th in a field of 114, but last month, in a frenzy of intellectual and physical excess, they cracked the Top 40, coming 39th out of 122.

Raising over £500,000 along the way for the NSPCC, more than 800 competitors from Britain’s leading companies and organisations competed in three days of challenges designed to push executives to the outer limits as they devised strategies, cracked codes, built structures and solved puzzles, all the while cycling, orienteering and generally careering their way around the magnificent but tough terrain of the Peak district.

As the Microsoft publicity puts it…

“Competitors emerge from the challenge jubilant and with the knowledge that they have learned vital skills for business including communication, advanced decision making and strategy.”

                                SHOCK AND AWE

The top seven teams, among them squads from Dell, Lloyds TSB and, reassuringly, Airbus, will be travelling to the South of France later in the year to compete in the international stages of the event.  Meanwhile,  the overall winner of the British leg was none other than the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston, which these days markets itself as AWE and hosts the largest and most advanced R&D centre in the UK, designing and manufacturing Britain’s nuclear warheads - obviously a useful training ground for moving extremely rapidly when the occasion demands.

Rumours that the victorious AWE team have atomic brains spark a series of protests

 After nearly two decades with investment bank Morgan Stanley,  most recently as a distinguished Head of International Securities Lending, his decision to join Rule delivers extra prestige to the SF practice, and brings its headcount into double figures for the first time.  Its head, David Little, commented:        

“I’m delighted. Many of our clients will benefit from Alec’s thorough understanding of this very complex area of the business. Rule has always had a strong securities finance offering, with the ability to advise clients independently, and to deliver large projects on time and on budget. Alec’s arrival underlines this.”

Alec Nelson is married with two children and lives near Rochester in Kent, where he’s a keen badminton player and rides a Yamaha YZ125 in competitive Motocross.

Rule consultants are currently working on SF projects for many of the leading investment banks, including RBS, ABN, HSBC and Dresdner Kleinwort.      

       Alec Nelson on his way to work. Not. Right bike, though.