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The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs The latest content from across the platform

Always look on the bright side of life…

2008 will be the year when we see how serious firms are about reference data. This is a phrase I’ve borrowed from a leading industry observer because I think it aptly sums up the general thinking of those involved in reference data as the new year kicks off. Without wishing to be unnecessarily gloomy, the…

Desjardins Cleans Up Entity Data, Deploys SunGard Adaptiv Credit Risk

Desjardins Group has signed a three-year deal with CounterpartyLink for the provision of legal entity data as part of a larger counterparty and issuer risk project that will also see Desjardins – the biggest co-operative financial group in Canada – implement SunGard Adaptiv Credit Risk. CounterpartyLink’s data will first be used by Desjardins to ensure…

ICMA Ltd Renames, Builds Warehouse To Support New Information Services

Under its new name and governance, Xtrakter – the market services division of the International Capital Market Assocation (ICMA), formerly known as ICMA Limited – is targeting a higher profile as a data vendor. Xtrakter is gearing up to unleash a raft of new fixed income pricing and reference data products, and believes its legal…

Buy Buy Buy

There was quite a bit of M&A activity last week. Oracle and BEA for $8.5 billion (we’ll have to see whether that’s good news for BEA’s Weblogic Event Server), Sun Microsystems and MySQL for a billion, and NYSE-Euronext snapping up Wombat Financial Software for $200 million. For Wombat – headquartered in Nevada’s Incline Village where…

Slovakia’s Tatra Bank Deploys SuperDerivatives

Tatra Bank, one of Slovakia’s highest rated banks and a member of the Raiffeisen Zentralbank Osterreich AG (RZB) Group, is deploying SuperDerivatives’ platform for commodities derivatives. SD-CM, SuperDerivatives’ benchmark system for commodity options, provides real-time market prices, risk management and analytics for options on any traded commodity including energy products, metals, and agriculture commodities.

Xignite, Telekurs Forge Corporate Actions Data Distribution Deal

Xignite, provider of financial web services for mission-critical corporate applications, has formed a partnership with Telekurs Financial to provide reciprocal services integrating Xignite’s financial web services with Telekurs Valordata Feed (VDF). The partnership with Xignite will enhance the accuracy of its existing XigniteMaster and web service by using Telekurs VDF’s master data and corporate actions…

Reuters Adds Hourly Corporate Actions Data to DataScope Select

Reuters has added an enhancement to Reuters DataScope Select which will see its corporate actions data updated hourly, rather than once a day. Users will be able to monitor portfolios more actively by choosing how often they receive updates and paying according to the quantity of data they use. Reuters clients will now be able…

Harvard Management Licenses XSP v5 Corporate Actions Software

Harvard Management Company (HMC) has licensed the XSP v5 corporate actions platform. HMC has also licensed XSP’s web-based eTRAN (Electronic Tracking Response and Notifications) and Swift ISO messaging modules for the notification and response capture of elections processing. The XSP v5 platform is built around a service-oriented architecture (SOA), utilising Microsoft .Net components and web…

A perfect match?

The acquisition by Markit of Swapswire garnered considerable attention by virtue simply of being the latest in a seemingly never-ending stream of acquisitions by the data and valuations provider. True to form, with this venture Markit puts itself at the leading edge of the capital markets’ preoccupation – improving the automation of OTC derivatives. In…

A-Team Analysis: Time to Look for Alternatives to ISO for Standards?

Unrest among industry participants about the efficacy of ISO standards creation is reaching a peak as the failure of the formal process to keep pace with the reality of market requirements looks set to prompt a rethink about the best way to create standards for financial markets. Whether there is a better method for solving…