'After a challenging 2020, we start the new year with confidence. Our digital communication tools and channels have proven their worth in recent months, allowing our staff to continue working from home.
All MACD teams are working hard to further develop and improve the products and services together with clients and partners. A lot has happened in the area of fund trading and in the development of our new MAX trading system. But we also made progress behind the scenes.
We very much hope that the pandemic situation will improve in 2021 and that we can see each other face to face again. Until then, stay healthy!'
George Macdonald, CEO MACD
The fund market is currently undergoing change. MACD has greatly expanded its range of fund trading solutions through a cooperation with SIX Global Fund Services of the Swiss Stock Exchange as well as Allfunds, one of the world's leading fund distribution platforms.
Both fund partners participate in the MACD Broker Programme, which brings benefits to MACD clients. The brokers additionally participate in the operating and development costs, so that clients can benefit from lower connection costs and additional features.
One MACD customer is already live with the new service MAX Fund Trade and three more connections are planned.
Media Releases:
We welcome Winterflood as a new broker in the MACD community. The first connection to a MAX client took place in November 2020. Winterflood offers services for the entire sector of listed closed-end funds in the UK.
The migration of the previous trading systems GLOX and XKYTE to the successor product MAX continues. Despite some postponements due to the Corona pandemic, the large scale Data Center Move (which has now been completed), and at the request of customers, some MACD customers have already migrated successfully to MAX.
Florian Fruth, Head of Securities Processing, NatWest Group:
'The Upgrade from XKYTE to MAX was one of the important and challenging projects for our division at NatWest in 2020. It allowed us to re-think & re-design the internal trading/IT-infrastructure while adjusting to changed technical circumstances. Particularly during conceptualizing the new architecture, MACD has proven very flexible and competent in assisting us to find our optimal setup. Despite rather difficult conditions (COVID-19 pandemic, remote work, large trading volumes on the migration weekend), the Go-Live went very well & smooth.'
You can find more information about MAX on our website macd.com and in our new MAX Trading System brochure. Also take a look at the new MAX Service Flyers on the different functionalities:
With the move to a new data centre in Zurich, MACD has undertaken a fundamental renewal of the technical basis of all products & services, including:
Our customers and partners benefit from various improvements, for example:
The move was accompanied by a step-by-step migration. In order to avoid failures, a parallel operation of the systems was established. Nevertheless, the move did not go off without a hitch. Some customers experienced disruptions. We would like to take this opportunity to thank once again for the understanding and support.
More details about this project and also some personal views can be found in the blog of Christoph Strauch, Team Leader System & Network Administration.
At the end of 2020, all MACD employees were surveyed for the first time on ten internal topics, e.g. work situation and climate, home office, cross-site collaboration. The goal is to further develop MACD together on various levels.
The online survey format has several advantages over oral feedback rounds, e.g.:
The strong participation rate of almost 90 percent speaks for the great commitment on the part of the team and for authentic results.
In addition to excellent results (100% enjoy coming to work and attest to a good work-life balance), there is of course also potential for improvement, which is now being analysed in detail.
Christoph John, Senior Software Developer at MACD, talked with Chris Lees from FixSpec about his involvement in QuickFIX/J - the open-source JAVA engine for the FIX Protocol. An interview about the motivation to maintain such a project and the challenge of standardizing financial information.
We use the content management system TYPO3 to create content for our website macd.com. The previous add-on "Direct Mail", responsible for sending newsletters directly from the backend, could now be programmed as a fixed and important part of TYPO3 thanks to the financial support of MACD and other sponsors.
