Swift to Connect KYC Registry with Regional Utilities

Swift, a global provider of secure financial messaging services, is reportedly in talks with regional KYC utilities regarding the potential connection of their solutions with its KYC Registry, an online portal set up in 2014 to manager and share KYC due diligence and information.

Although the registry has until now been used only by financial institutions with correspondent banking services, the firm is planning to open the service up to corporate clients by the end of 2019.

Volkswagen Bank Chooses BearingPoint for Regulatory Reporting

Germany’s Volkswagen Bank has confirmed a switch from an in-house regulatory reporting solution to the standard Abacus360 Banking Regulatory software package from BearingPoint. BearingPoint will provide the software and also take over the tasks and processes of the technical operation, in addition to providing infrastructure and support services within the scope of managed services. Volkswagen will also outsource the supply chain from its own data warehouse to BearingPoint.

ESMA Makes New Bond Liquidity Data Available

From the 1st August the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) has made available new data for bonds subject to the pre- and post-trade requirements of MiFID II and MiFIR through its data register.

MiFID II, which came into force in January 2018, introduced pre- and post-trade transparency requirements for equity and non-equity instruments, including for bonds. Post-trade, MiFID II requires real-time publication of the price and quantity of trades in liquid bonds. It is possible to defer the publication of post-trade reports if the instrument does not have a liquid market, or if the transaction size is above large-in-scale thresholds (LIS), or above a size specific to the instrument (SSTI). In order to assist market participants to know whether a bond should be considered as liquid or not, ESMA now publishes these quarterly liquidity assessments for bonds.

For the current period, there are 594 liquid bonds subject to MiFID II transparency requirements.

SmartStream Partners Finanz Informatik Solutions Plus to Meet Client Needs in Germany

SmartStream Technologies has partnered German IT service provider Finanz Informatik Solutions Plus to help German clients with implementation projects and application management of SmartStream’s Corona reconciliation solutions, as well as its next generation Aurora transaction lifecycle management offerings. Under the agreement, Finanz Informatik and SmartStream will help large customers in the region digitalise their back office. The partnership will support reconciliation processes for financial institutions with trade activities, fees and invoice control, and cash and intra-day liquidity management needs in the German market.

ICE Agrees to Acquire Merrill Lynch Option Volatility Estimate Indices

Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) has agreed to acquire fixed income volatility indices, including the Merrill Lynch Option Volatility Estimate (MOVE) family of indices, from Bank of America Merrill Lynch. The MOVE Index is a well-recognised measure of US interest rate volatility and can provide a signal for changing risk sentiment in fixed income markets. ICE will also acquire variations of MOVE that track different option expiries, as well as other indices that measure volatility in the US interest rate swap market. The indices will become part of ICE Data Indices, which leverages ICE Data Services’ pricing, reference data and analytics solutions.

Charles River Expands Collaboration with MarketAxess

Charles River Development, a State Street Company, has expanded its collaboration with MarketAxess, a provider of e-trading for global fixed income. Under the expansion, Charles River clients will be offered access to MarketAxess’s Auto-X trading functionality for investment-grade credit, high-yield, emerging market debt and Eurobonds. This will allow traders and portfolio managers to source liquidity directly from the Charles River OEMS for fixed income securities in more than 25 currencies across Europe, Africa, Latin America and Asia-Pacific. It will also support auto-execute orders, deliver trade allocations to dealer counterparties and receive allocation acknowledgements in an STP workflow.

CLS Adds China CITIC Bank International to Settlement Service

CLS, a market infrastructure group delivering settlement, processing and data solutions, has named China CITIC Bank International (CNCBI) as the first Chinese bank to access CLSSettlement as a third-party client. Bai Lijun, executive director, alternate CEO and treasurer, CNCBI, comments: “By becoming a participant in CLSSettlement, CNCBI aims to mitigate settlement risk, reduce operational costs related to FX trading, and create opportunities for business expansion by enabling CNCBI to do more business with a larger number of counterparties.” CLS says expanding third-party participation in CLSSettlement is part of its growth strategy in Asia Pacific.

EDI Releases Point in Time Security Reference Feed

Exchange Data International (EDI), a provider of global security corporate actions, pricing and reference data services, has released a security reference file feed called PIT (Point In Time). The feed allows clients to track, at a listing level, changes to securities coding and other key security reference data points at any point in time. The point in time’s start and end dates use public domain effective date from the event that triggered the change. This means historical reference data returned by query will represent the actual values that markets would have recorded on the specified search date.

R3 Expands Blockchain Software Engineering Team

R3, provider of Corda blockchain software and a player in capital markets, plans to double the size of its London Wall hub to accommodate its growing engineering team. The extra space will also support a hiring plan to increase the company’s global headcount from 215 to nearly 300 by the end of the year. Of this, over half of the new hires will be in the London office, with more than 40 new recruits being made in the capital. The firm’s roster of new hires will consist largely of software engineers.

NIBC Bank Migrates to Torstone Post-trade Platform

Netherlands-based NIBC Bank has completed migration to Torstone Technology’s Inferno post-trade processing platform. Inferno was selected to replace NIBC’s legacy systems as the bank rationalises its operations to drive efficiencies across the wider business. Consolidating processes on Torstone’s SaaS platform will also enable NIBC to benefit from Torstone’s service model, resulting in reduced total cost of ownership. The implementation project began in January 2019, with the bank’s equities and fixed income processes migrating to Torstone’s platform in six months.