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| White Papers and Webinars |
 Insurmountable Technical Debt (and the Canadian Financial Securities Environment) |
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'Technical debt' is a brilliantly concise metaphor that cannily describes the behaviour of software and surrounding processes implemented in the real world of limited costs and time. The debt refers to work undone, which either must eventually be undertaken by subsequent projects or managed through ever more intricate workarounds. The debt is hidden, so that projects typically uncover it late in their development cycle or once they are in production. The problem with technical debt is not system failure so much as system calcification. As more demands are made of a system already mired in technical debt, projects to meet those demands become increasingly unpredictable, expensive and compromised.
When systems fall within a defined domain, technical debt can often be wiped clean by replacing the systems within that domain. However systems usually exist in poorly defined domains. When those domains are permitted to morph over time, and particularly when core components of such systems are considered “mission critical”, the result can be so difficult to modify that settling for iteratively more frustrating idiosyncrasies becomes the only option. This accurately describes whole swaths of the Canadian brokerage industry, making it an ideal case study for the 1-hour Technobility webinar entitled Insurmountable Technical Debt, presented by Dan Brennan. |
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| Institutional Straight-Through Processing in the Canadian Financial Markets |
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Straight-through Processing (STP), long a goal of the Canadian Institutional marketplace, remains somewhat elusive despite more than a decade of effort that has nevertheless seen very useful progress. This four-slide paper illustrates the complex relationships among institutional participants, which helps illustrate why even though significant progress has been made, STP has not yet been fully achieved. |
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| Additon’s Response to the CCMA’s Best Practices |
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Additon Consulting was involved in the evolution of regulation NI 24-101, the regulation that today governs timeframes within which institutional trades must be allocated and matched among participating firms. An example of our contribution in this area includes our response to the CCMA's draft document outlining proposed best practices and standards for achieving industry-wide straight-through processessing. Additon Consulting prepared a response based both on the experience of the group of associates who contributed to that response and on discussions with several industry participants. In our response we outlined a concern that the dual solution approach proposed by the CCMA created no clear solution. We felt this in turn would create an atmosphere for inaction that ultimately represented a negative pressure on Canada's capital markets. Our view recommended that the OSC pick one solution and move on. See our reasoning here (in PDF format) or here (in Word format). |
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