Australian Government announces SIRCA-led Financial Services Innovation Partnership

Today SIRCA announced the success of its proposal to create a $40m Australian Financial Services Industry Innovation Partnership based around Sydney’s Barangaroo with a foundation commitment from the Australian Government of over $15m. A national consortium of Businesses, Universities and State Governments plan to match the Government’s investment in the initiative.

For the full press release please click here.

AusEquities gets a boost!

Sirca Members using AusEquities should have noticed a boost in performance recently. The Sirca team have more than doubled the processing power dedicated to the AusEquities service resulting in jobs moving through the system much faster.

We’ve also added a dedicated processing system for “small” requests (50 instrument days or less – i.e. 4 instruments for 5 days history = 20 instrument days) which means that small requests get serviced quickly and are not queued behind large jobs.

As always, Sirca welcomes your feedback so feel free to let us know via the Helpdesk link in the Member Portal

Call for Papers – Third Sirca Young Researcher Workshop, November 2013

In May 2012 Sirca announced a series of initiatives that provide additional member benefits. These initiatives are all directed at enhancing research training and research support for our members. They are being overseen by a newly created Membership Research Committee (MRC) and the appointment of Professor Terry Walter as Sirca’s Chief Research Officer.

One such initiative is a Young Researcher Workshop. Under this proposal young researchers working or studying in member universities will travel to Sydney (with travel and accommodation costs being met by Sirca) to present their current finance or accounting research, and to receive expert commentary on the research from a member of the MRC. The Workshop will be held twice per year and five papers will be presented at each workshop.

We now invite young researchers to submit a current research paper for possible inclusion in the third workshop. Submitted papers should be sufficiently advanced to benefit from feedback and suggestions from a seminar presentation. Send papers to the following email address callforpapers@sirca.org.au. The deadline for submission is 15 September 2013. Notification of the six papers to be included will be made by 16 October 2013, at which time we will also advise the nominated MRC referee who will discuss the paper at the workshop. These six presentations will be made on Friday 8 November 2013. Sirca will also invite a further group of nine young researchers to the workshop as attendees and to participate in shorter research presentations in the afternoon of 7 November 2013. Discussions of these shorter presentations will be provided by young researchers attending the workshop. Sirca will meet all reasonable travel and accommodation costs for the presenters and the invited attendees.

To qualify for inclusion at least one of the authors of the submitted paper must be a young researcher. We define a young researcher to be a person currently engaged in PhD research or one whose PhD thesis was completed less than five years ago. We particularly encourage young researchers in regional universities to apply for the workshop. We prefer papers that are sole authored by a young researcher, however jointly authored papers also qualify.

Sirca wants to track the progress of papers submitted at this workshop and therefore be kept informed of publication outcomes.

The MRC has the following academic members:

  • Kevin Davis (Chairman, Member of the Sirca Limited Board)
  • Terry Walter (Sirca, CRO)
  • Henk Berkman (University of Auckland)
  • Carole Comerton-Forde (University of Melbourne)
  • Mardi Dungey (University of Tasmania)
  • Robert Faff (University of Queensland)
  • Bruce Grundy (University of Melbourne)
  • Ray da Silva Rosa (University of Western Australia)
  • Petko Kalev (University of South Australia)
  • Dave Michayluk (UTS)