Living with PROD Where would regulators be without their acronyms? Nevertheless, PROD has potentially far-reaching consequences for your business. Understanding your shared responsibilities with product providers and fund platforms is critical. What is PROD? Designed by the UK Financial Conduct Authority (“FCA”) to ensure compliance with MiFID II, PROD – or ‘Product Intervention and Product…
Both sides of the coin This article looks to recap on the highs and lows of 2019 and what we can learn from what we have seen and heard across the industry. Against a strong and stable market backdrop that saw global equity markets continue to march higher and higher, the year came with a…
Designed by the FCA to ensure compliance with MIFID II, PROD – or the ‘Product Intervention and Product Governance Sourcebook’ to give it its full name – is part rulebook, part template and to date has been met with mixed opinion. The intention is to ensure MIFID II guidelines are consistently met, with special focus…
You’d have to be dead in a ditch not to know of the political maelstrom that is sweeping the country in the name of Brexit. With shadowy Downing Street figures pulling the strings. Conservative heavyweights have toppled like dominoes, and while the pound has tanked in response to Boris Johnson’s renewed commitment to leaving, so…
Is a quant-only investment strategy enough? The great and necessary question posed by Portfolio Adviser in a recent article Could Quants save advisers from the ‘cult of star managers’? has led us to debate whether a quant-only approach is enough to avoid investing in funds purely based on past reputation? A fully quant system will…
Say Ta-Ta to Time Honoured Traditions From men in stuffy suits to penny-pinching portrayals of misers, accountancy has always suffered a chronic lack of glamour. Despite sky-high professional entry requirements, critical business processes and big salaries, it’s always been the boring big brother to the pace, luxury and sheer sexiness of banking. After all, while…
Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho, better known as Martha Lane-Fox, the online entrepreneur who made both her name and her fortune with lastminute.com is certainly a name to be trusted when it comes to technology. But while she’s a strong advocate of the digital age, her recent speech in the House of Lords last September sounded…
While the rise of machine learning may make sense in many ways, how exactly it fits into the complicated and fast-paced world of finance may not be so clear. After all, while a machine may be able to learn from a given input, how can it take its cues from the relative freneticism of finance?The…
Machine learning may have been a buzzword for a while, but if you don’t know what it is, you’re certainly not alone. Rumours abound what it is – and isn’t – so let’s go back to basics to ascertain its true nature. Arthur Samuel, one of the 20th century’s greatest scientific minds, put it best…
While artificial intelligence (AI) is most closely associated with dystopian cities and anonymous robot armies, you don’t have to be a student of the sci-fi genre to understand its applications, nor to make good use of it. Setting aside the fields of electric dreams, the highly practical sub-section of AI known as ‘machine learning,’ –…
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