Jordan & Jordan’s understanding of the complex and changing interrelationships of technology, market structure, regulation and competition provides a unique perspective and sustains our ability to assist broker dealers, exchanges and other market participants in ensuring their platforms and processes properly support requirements for electronic trading, matching, reporting, clearing and settlement and other mission critical activities.

Technology and Process Improvements

Our consultants draw from years of market experience and knowledge of industry best practices to provide clients with rational, practical recommendations and implementation-ready plans for improvements in any aspect of the business process or technology. With expertise across instruments and the trade lifecycle from pre-trade through execution, settlement and asset servicing, our comprehensive perspective of the markets helps you achieve your company goals.

Jordan & Jordan’s team of seasoned consultants bring domain expertise from a wide variety of functional areas. Let our experts review your problem areas, identify areas for improvement in your processes and technology, share best practices, and provide recommendations.

Examples of process and/or technology reviews we have conducted for numerous firms include:

• Smart Order Routing
• Order and Execution Management
• Electronic Trading
• FIX Connectivity
• Market Data Distribution Platforms
• Regulatory Reporting
• Middle and Back Office Processing Systems
• Global Clearing and Settlement Systems for All Asset Classes

Project Management & Staff Augmentation

Jordan & Jordan is highly experienced in managing large-scale projects. We have been particularly successful in managing industry-wide initiatives and projects required to meet new and changing regulations; where timelines are critical, subject matter expertise is a necessity and your internal resources must be used efficiently.

In addition to full Project Management, Jordan & Jordan can provide a wide range of project-based services including:

• Gap Analysis
• Business and technology impact assessment
• Business process change analysis
• Integration requirements analysis
• Data requirements analysis
• Implementation resource planning
• Migration strategy
• Staff Augmentation

Symphony Implementation and Project Management

In October of 2014, fifteen of the world's largest financial institutions representing both the buy and sell sides of the industry, created a new consortium to provide the entire industry with secure instant messaging and bilateral collaboration.  The resulting offering is Symphony, a secure, open source platform that has revolutionized the way firms will be communicating in the future.

Now with over 100 firms in various stages of implementation of this new communications platform, these firms all face the realities of onboarding a new and more cost effective approach to internal and external messaging and workflow activities.  Implementation teams have a broad spectrum of responsibilities in making Symphony a reality to their organizations.  Issues range from piloting the service to key users, to risk and compliance reviews and concerns, to technical installation to entitlement controls.  

Given the wide range of functions Symphony can enhance in a firm, it is incumbent on the owners of this project at each firm to have a solid plan and project management team in place to insure the seamless adoption of this new and exciting platform.  

Operational and IT Risk Analysis and Reporting

Basel, Sarbanes Oxley, Dodd-Frank and other regulations have put increased strain on existing risk management and compliance staff. The SEC is scrutinizing firms’ IT programs, focusing on risk controls for software deployment as well as security. Executives have prioritized identification and remediation of operational and IT risk for purposes of regulatory reporting and heightened corporate governance and oversight.

At most firms, systems that track risk are not deployed enterprise-wide; therefore, data quality is generally poor due to difficulty in collecting consistent data and the lack of integration. Reporting is heavily manual and can be prone to error. Jordan & Jordan provides experienced staff support to banks, brokers, and other financial services companies to help with gathering and analyzing information from disparate sources. Our consultants can be of assistance in collecting and categorizing various instances of operational/IT risk across the organization and from numerous business units for purposes of reporting; and, our consultants can help identify open issues and create action plans to track remediation.

Examples of processes that might be considered in the operational workflow and risk reporting include: managing risk ticket remediation, SOX Signoffs, internal and external audit support, and UAT Testing.

Jordan & Jordan can help firms seeking a more integrated solution by providing assistance in normalizing firm-wide input to a centralized control framework that is already in place; or, we can support the vendor selection process for an enterprise operational/IT risk monitoring system.

Reference Data for Risk Management

Enterprise Data Management (EDM) has been talked about for years by theorists and data czars promising cost-savings through error reduction and consolidation of multiple data platforms. Some firms have been more successful than others in their attempts to centralize reference data, and for many the resulting benefits of cost-savings remain elusive. However, we believe the time is right for a renewed focus on Reference Data Management. EDM is no longer driven by cost-savings, but is being imposed by the regulators in the form of risk monitoring and reporting requirements, where “good data” is needed to provide a sound foundation.

Accurate reference data is mission critical, as risk management, proper regulatory reporting, tax reporting and other key aspects of regulatory compliance have reached priority status. Reference data and Compliance are inextricably linked.

Jordan & Jordan can assist in addressing data issues of accuracy, completeness, consistency and timeliness. Jordan & Jordan provides data management expertise that leverages our subject matter experts’ Product knowledge (global equities, options, futures, indexes, OTC derivatives, FX and fixed income securities), our Content knowledge (terms and conditions, pricing and valuations, research, analytics), and our Technological know-how, as the need to effectively link siloed Client/Account/Counterparty data (e.g. LEIs, domiciles, credit agreements) with a multitude of disparate internal and external reference databases and transactional data is well understood as a critical component of enterprise data management.