Mondo Visione Exchange Forum 2014

This year’s Exchange Forum will be looking at how exchanges and other trading venues are facing up to the twin forces of permanent regulatory change and disruptive change.

Should regulators simulate the effects of regulatory change in a lab before inflicting them on the market? Or will it always be like Oppenheimer said when he first saw the atomic bomb go off, "God what have we wrought".

Is it time for market design changes? Time to end the high-frequency trading arms race? Michael Lewis in his book, "Flash Boys," claims that the US stock market is rigged by a combination of the stock exchanges, the big Wall Street banks, and high frequency traders. Is he correct? Is the current market design optimal? IEX – Flash in the pan or antidote to the “Flash boy racers”?

What are the challenges facing exchange groups? Is there an over reliance on derivative products? How successful are exchanges at finding significant new revenue streams in an increasingly competitive environment? Is a push into post-trade, technology, indices, investor relations, and that old faithful, data services, the diversified way forward?

Are central-counterparties too big to fail? Is the reliance on a small set of banks for payment services, funding, settlement and emergency liquidity a cause for significant concern?

Are the changes occurring in capital markets too complex for the technology being by regulators and market operators charged with oversight of markets? Do they have the state-of-the-art information technology to augment and support their human capital? Is Big Data analytics the answer? Crystal balls anyone?

Does crowdfunding have the potential to disrupt the traditional VC industry? Has bitcoin and other emerging cryptocurrencies shot their bolt? How about the WOCU?

Africa’s financial markets are growing in terms of size and breadth of instruments traded but it is not uncommon for African companies to outgrow their local market and to seek a listing in London, New York, Hong Kong or Toronto, as they target bourses with good liquidity and sufficient capital availability. Do African exchanges need to regionalise? Whither commodity exchanges in Africa?

Our panels are lively and topical.