Paul

About Paul Rowady

Paul Rowady is the Director of Research for Alphacution Research Conservatory, a research and strategic advisory platform uniquely focused on modeling and benchmarking the impacts of technology on global financial markets and the businesses of trading, asset management and banking. He is a 30-year veteran of the proprietary, quantitative and derivatives trading arenas. Contact: feedback@alphacution.com; Follow: @alphacution.

Feed Your Cognitive Taste Buds: Collaboration Will Expedite Validation

As you gorge yourself on the latest curated fire hose of content today, this post may waft onto your cognitive taste buds like a shameless plug. Fine. Like a herd of squirrels, here comes the next and the next and the next tweet anyways, just right for your canine attention span. It's all good, and no hard feelings. We will aspire to catch you with the next tidbit or on a different modality... But for those of you who care to pause and consider the deeper value here  - I offer this reminder and some inside baseball for your own creative purposes: In parallel with the mission to deliver uncommon and data-driven intelligence for the financial services (FSI) ecosystem, Alphacution was also founded to eat at its own kitchen - which is a practice that we have discovered over many years is rarely the case with research and advisory platforms. (By the way, not pointing any fingers - its not necessarily anyone's fault. Convention is a gravitational bitch.) Translation: If [...]

By |2020-12-03T21:27:35-05:00October 14th, 2016|News|
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Ding-a-L-ING Group’s Deconstruction

On Monday, 3 October, ING Group - formerly the Netherlands' largest lender and one of the world's largest financial conglomerates - announced plans to cut 7,000 jobs from its ranks of about 52,000 in order to invest in digital platforms that are expected to generate annual savings of 900 million euros ($1 billion) by 2021. Beyond this, what is fascinating about ING is the rare glimpse it gives us into the post-global financial crisis (GFC) dismantling of one of the world's financial behemoths. We have few other case studies - although, oddly enough, ABN Amro does come to mind - where we see the persistent "reverse-conglomeration" of a large and global financial services powerhouse. As a stipulation of the Dutch state-funded capital infusion in the wake of the events surrounding the GFC in 2008-2009, ING Group was essentially forced to sell off numerous businesses in order to maintain or exceed minimum capital ratios. The chart below details the timeline and more than 50 divestitures that have occurred since the GFC. Here [...]

By |2020-10-05T21:09:31-04:00October 4th, 2016|Open|
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Thomson Reuters publishes “Quantifying the Transformation”

Everything takes longer than you initially think it will. Never a truer statement made, particularly when it comes to the following: Negotiated, commissioned and subsequently developed  - and then re-vamped - for completion on an expedited timeline last spring (2016), our first annual deep-dive study into technology spending patterns among the largest global banks was only recently published by client-partner Thomson Reuters. We have referenced this work and output regularly over the past several months, but there is something special about having a partner bring it to light. We are grateful to finally put this corner-stone credential in place. Access Thomson Reuter's "chapterized" version here or the entire document here:  Enjoy.  There is much more of this output - and key developments surrounding that output - on the way soon...

By |2020-12-03T21:29:03-05:00October 3rd, 2016|News|
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Navigational FinTelligence: The Method and the Madness

This post includes a metaphor, an anecdote and a vision.  Ready?  Here's the sketch: A magician - who was prone to playing the "long ball" - sought to develop the world's greatest card trick. True to form, the magician asks a volunteer to pick a card, sign his name to it, and put it back in the deck. The magician then claims to transport that card into a tree. When the tree was cut down immediately thereafter, the autographed playing card was found, encased in glass, nestled within the heart of the trunk. A weary traveler - and avid puzzle-builder - walks into the Louvre gift shop in 2002 and purchases one of the world's largest jigsaw puzzles. It was 8,000 pieces, when assembled, depicting an elaborate fresco created by Luca Giordano during the Habsburg Dynasty (known as "trigolo degli Asburgo"). The puzzle sat in its box until 2007 when - over the course of the next year - the puzzle was assembled on two adjoining sheets of 4' by 8' [...]

By |2020-10-05T21:09:08-04:00September 23rd, 2016|Open|
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Can (Digital) Transformation Be Measured?

A sextant is an optical navigation device used by sailors starting around 1730. With practice, it can prove quite accurate in plotting courses. Though the contemporary digital equivalent - a global positioning system (GPS) - has become the mainstream tool for navigation, sextants are still in use today among a small but avid group of yachtsman, survivalists and cognoscenti. Keep this migration in mind as we walk through today's question: Can (digital) transformation be measured? Our answer to this, of course, is yes - however, as in most cases, the specificity of measurement is data dependent. So, the qualified "yes" to this question, for now, relates to measuring transformation at the enterprise level. This is because the necessary enterprise data is relatively easy to find in the financial disclosures of the companies in our initial target sample. There is also rhyme and reason to starting at enterprise level because it plays squarely into our long term vision to define the total value of technology spending in the financial services ecosystem - [...]

By |2020-10-05T21:08:42-04:00September 20th, 2016|Open|
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Bank Technology Rant: You are Noah, This is the Flood…

Do you recognize this guy above? That's right. He's Captain Obvious! Captain Obvious is the guy who preaches to the choir; tells Noah about the flood... Get it?  Good. Let's move on. Here's the translation for today's rant: "Noah" is a Top 10 investment bank, the "flood" in this case is McKinsey & Company, or - I suspect - any of the other global management consulting powerhouses. Today, I "learned" from both Financial Times and Business Insider the following (from the BI article, my emphasis added): "How are bank executives to cut costs? McKinsey's answer is technology...because technology seems to be part of the answer to every question these days." Now, just let the sweet wisdom of that pearl roll around in your gourd for a minute. If you're anything like I was earlier, you are now having a reaction like the one below (annotation not mine). I know, right?! Mesmerizing stuff. Thank me later for sharing the epiphany. Not SEEMS. IS! Technology IS a part of every solution these days, along with [...]

By |2020-10-05T21:08:32-04:00September 16th, 2016|Open|
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Back to the Front: Post-Trade Processing Getting Sexy-er

If you happen to hear the drumbeat of these things called "operational analytics" getting louder, then you just may be dialed in to the subtle downstream impacts of some of today's most common headlines related to financial enterprise transformation. For instance, the fintech revolution we are living through - with all its new-fangled and often overly-hyped gadgetry - is really about harnessing the opportunity for unprecedented process efficiencies. But, while it is a soothing distraction to daydream about deploying new digital tools during the ongoing regulatory hurricane, the economic impact that they will have on the FSI landscape is barely going to move the needle anytime soon. Of course, there are exceptions to this broad brush stroke: The impact of evolving IT infrastructure solutions from Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) to software defined networks (SDNs) to any number of other high-performance compute and storage tools are already sufficiently mature to be making a major impact on architectures and technology buying patterns. A similar statement could be made about open source big data tools such [...]

By |2020-10-05T21:08:22-04:00September 14th, 2016|Open|
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#ResearchTools or Research ‘Tools’?

I have been holding on to this rant since Friday (unfortunately) - so here it is for your Monday morning coffee or commute enjoyment... Scenario: Surfing my Twitter feed and I stumble over a new piece of research (from a well-known group) which is being distributed and promoted by a well-known, bulge-bracket tech firm. The headline "hook" language is compelling.  It reads something like: "The essential ingredients for digital transformation" yada, yada.  So, I bite - recognizing the players and interested in what they have to say. I crack open the attached report and what I find there is maybe half a whiff less than pure and total bullshit.  10 pages, 1 word-filled diagram, entirely sanitized of anything close to resembling a number. Clearly, this scenario is the brainchild of an incumbent tech vendor's marketing team. I have witnessed - and participated in (and been complicit in even!) - dozens and dozens of these projects whose template was gleefully lifted out of the seemingly ubiquitous and cobweb-encrusted playbook entitled "Best Ways [...]

By |2020-10-05T21:08:10-04:00July 25th, 2016|Open|
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#Launchpad: Introducing the New Alphacution Website and Content

Our team has largely been on hiatus for the past couple months developing several new assets, including most notably our new Alphacution "content storage, distribution and promotion application" - er - website, and a bunch of new content to go in it which begins to showcase our research methodologies and initial modeling output. For the attention-deficit crowd (and those who are not already reading this on the site), you can skip the following shout-outs and contextual comments by hopping to www.alphacution.com now. In addition to our Feed section (for commentaries, videos, press coverage and company news), you will find a lot of "freemium" content accessible in the Open Exhibits Library and the Document Library. A short - and FREE - registration process will open access to those components and add your details to our newsletter distribution list. Please don't skip that part - and for extra credit, send us your feedback (info@alphacution.com) no matter the temperature... For the rest of you, here's some of the context behind these latest developments: [...]

By |2020-12-03T21:30:50-05:00July 19th, 2016|News|
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Higher exchange fees for data seen after judge nixes SIFMA case

Originally published by Reuters here. Markets | Tue Jul 5, 2016 5:27pm EDT By Herbert Lash A judge for the Securities and Exchange Commission opened the door for U.S. exchanges to charge more for their high-speed data products, a move that could reduce the number of high-frequency trading firms that trade large quantities of securities. Brenda Murray, chief administrative law judge for the SEC, last month rejected a petition by a brokerage lobby to set aside fee increases for data sold by Nasdaq Inc and NYSE Arca, an exchange owned by Intercontinental Exchange Inc . Only a small group of firms, primarily high-frequency traders, will keep purchasing so-called depth-of-book data from all providers, said Paul Rowady, founder and director of research for Alphacution Research Conservatory. The impact may be to shrink the ranks of these data-intensive firms, he said. The Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), which has fought higher data fees for almost a decade, will have a hard time stopping price increases on the data in question, [...]

By |2020-10-05T21:07:37-04:00July 5th, 2016|Press|
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