The Transaction Auditing Group (TAG), a US-based performance and market quality assessment service provider, has appointed Walter Ferstand as senior vice president of its compliance and regulatory consulting services.
Ferstand will work with TAG's brokerage and exchange clients and prospects to evaluate, educate and advise on specific order reporting requirements, to ensure that each firm has a customised analytic reporting tool based on its specific needs. Ferstand will focus on cross-asset electronic and direct market access trading requirements, including Reg NMS 605 and 606, OATS, TRACE, TRF and MSRB compliance reporting.
Ferstand has 25 years of compliance and regulatory experience in the securities industry. Prior to joining TAG, he held senior compliance positions at both agency broker Instinet and derivatives broker MF Global. Before that, Ferstand served in various market operations management capacities during 10 years with Nasdaq.
“The regulatory requirements around what and how brokers and exchanges approach and document their order handling, routing and execution activities continues to grow in complexity,” said Roger Post, executive vice president at TAG. “Each firm's specific business model may introduce slight, yet significant nuance into how that information should be captured and measured.”
TAG recently announced plans to launch Integrated TCA, which aims to provide traders with analytics that can help to improve the quality of execution during the trading process. The firm is also working on a new web-based platform for release in Q2 2011 that will provide coverage across the US and Canadian institutional and retail markets for equities and options.