Our Top 10 Blogs of 2014
Those of you that read my articles will know that I often write about “What the Data Shows” in the context of Swap Data Repositories and Swap Execution Facilities. Given that it is the time of year for many of us to attend Offsite Events in order to plan for 2015 and reflect on performance […]
Why are there so many fintech startups in payments?
If you follow the FinTech Start-up scene in London, you cannot fail to notice the large number of start-ups in the payments space. A quick scan of the FinTech50 2014 list shows that twelve of the fifty firms focus on payments. These are AcceptEmail, Bottomline, Clear2pay, dovetail, GoCardLess, IXaris, Klarna, Lemonway, Paymill, Pingit, The Currency Cloud and […]
Inside Baseball: Lexicon Updates for OTC Derivatives
A few months ago I was speaking with journalist Katy Burne at the Wall Street Journal. I now forget what she asked me, but whatever it was, I had covered the topic in depth in one of my recent blogs. “Don’t you read my blogs?” I asked. Katy responded “To be honest, I try to, […]
Choosing A Managed DNS Provider
Recently Endurance International Group had a major outage, taking down many websites hosted and managed by providers such as Bluehost, Hostgator and JustHost. Our site was one of those, but of even more concern was that they were also providing our DNS (Domain Name System: mapping human readable url’s such as www.clarusft.com to IP addresses […]
Think Global, Act Local
We put out a press release today announcing that Tod Skarecky is joining us to head up our US business. Please see Tod Skarecky to head US Business. To add some background around this. For a while now it has become clear to us that the US is our most important market. As we are […]
The Lean StartUp and LinkedIn
For those of you not familiar with the Lean StartUp concept, I can recommend the recent HBR article “Why the Lean Start-Up Changes Everything.” The article points out the the value of “experimentation over elaborate planning, customer feedback over intuition, iterative design” and introduces concepts such as “minimum viable product” and “pivoting“. Some of the ideas […]
CloudBees: The extra member of the team
In football, the home team supporters energise their players by showing appreciation of good plays and creating an intimidating and distracting atmosphere for the opposing team. This advantage can be so great that is likened to having an extra player in the team, referred to as the ‘twelfth player‘ in the team. In many traditional […]
Business cards, Libor-rigging and Self-Interest
Going through my old business cards the other day, I spotted one for Tom Hayes, a Short Term Interest Rate Derivatives trader. Immediately it set me thinking whether this was the same Tom Hayes mentioned in the recent Libor-Rigging settlement at UBS. An Internet search did not throw up any categorical evidence that it was, […]
Accounting with Kashflow
I have been meaning to write a blog on my experiences with Kashflow for quite sometime, so finally here it is. Firstly why did I select Kashflow for my accounting needs, when every accountant will tell you to use Sage and I had previous experience of using Sage. Well to put in simply, I could […]
99Designs: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
99Designs is a crowdsourcing platform for graphic designers. We were interested in a new logo for Clarus and also curious about the modern 99Designs platform, so we hosted a ‘competition’ for the design of a new logo. We chose a ‘Silver’ competition (£339), received 219 entries from 64 different designers, and are very happy with […]