Swedish financial solutions provider, Cinnober, is aiming to provide greater cooperation of fintech industry standards through the launch of their Financial IT Quality Assessment (FIQA). Kicking off the initiative in June, Cinnober is inviting fintech industry players to join them in a Working Group in London to begin working on creating the framework for new standards. According to Cinnober, the need for the initiative comes as they believe the quality of financial industry IT has suffered, with exchange and company specific system outages as examples of the problem.
The initial proposals of FIQA will focus on initiatives for national exchanges, Cinnober’s target market. Explaining their goals, Cinnober stated in the public release of FIQA that they want to create a standard “help stakeholders in the financial industry achieve the best possible operational quality at the optimal cost, and provide tools to minimize and mitigate errors”. They believe that once in place, it will allow companies to gain an easier method to measure performance of Execution and how counterparties and third party vendors are operating.
Veronica Augustsson, CEO of Cinnober
The initiative is similar to a proposed framework of aggregation best practices that was floated by interbroker ICAP for its EBS electronic FX platform unit. Like that program, where EBS hoped to use is its internal experience to create standards for pricing aggregators that would benefit Liquidity takers and providers, Cinnober’s FIQA could potentially bring advantages to traders and exchanges that rely on financial technology to unite the market.
Speaking about the program, Veronica Augustsson, CEO of Cinnober stated “As financial markets have become increasingly global, intertwined and complex, awareness of system quality should be more important than ever.” She added that “If the financial IT eco system – system vendors, buyers and users – pulls together on this, we will be able to increase transparency on quality and costs, and buyers will be able to ensure system quality matches their requirements. But in the end it’s really about improving the functioning of financial markets and eliminating the repeated system failures that erode confidence.”
