ChartIQ Raises $17.4 Million in Series B Funding

ChartIQ, a provider of HTML5 real-time data charting software and most recently a desktop integration platform that connects disparate applications into a unified desktop solution, has completed Series B funding, led by German investor Digital+ Partners, of $17.4 million. The company will use the funding to increase hiring efforts, expand its headquarters in Charlottesville, Virginia and invest in research and development. It currently employs 50 staff globally and includes nine of the largest global investment banks among its customers. In total, ChartIQ has raised over $20 million in funding since its founding in 2012.

Shield FC Wins Deloitte RegTech Challenge

Shield Financial Compliance (Shield FC) has been named by Deloitte as one of the most innovative start-ups using artificial intelligence (AI) to solve regulatory challenges in the financial sector.

Shield FC’s cross-regulation compliance platform provides a 360 view of all electronics communications and trades, making compliance more efficient and ROI driven.

“As Deloitte, we are proud to create for Shield FC the opportunity to be a part of our innovation ecosystem that aims to solve real business problems and meet our clients’ needs,” said the Deloitte RegTech Challenge team.

Theta Lake Raises $5m in Seed Funding

Theta Lake, an AI-based RegTech provider for video communication compliance based in California, has raised $5 million in its first round of Series A seed funding led by Neotribe Ventures and Firebolt Ventures.

Theta Lake’s platform uses AI to help compliance teams more effectively scale their compliance risk detection and workflow for supervising communication on modern video, voice, and unified collaboration systems.

Brussels Issues Draft Guidelines for AI Regulation

In December 2018 the European Commission’s High Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence (AI HLEG) released its ‘Draft Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI’, a working document for stakeholder engagement that cites AI as “one of the most transformative forces of our time.” The guidelines emphasise that “an ethical approach to AI is key to enable responsible competitiveness” and provide a list of requirements including Accountability, Data Governance, Design for all, Governance of AI Autonomy (Human oversight), NonDiscrimination, Respect for Human Autonomy, Respect for Privacy, Robustness, Safety, Transparency. A final draft is expected in March 2019. The Guidelines are not intended as a substitute to any form of policymaking or regulation, which will be dealt with in the AI HLEG’s second deliverable: the Policy & Investment Recommendations, due in May 2019.

Australia Expands Accountability Regime

The recently-released report from Australia’s Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry recommended that ‘BEAR’ (the Banking Executive Accountability Regime) should be expanded to all Australian Prudential Regulation Authority-regulated financial services institutions. Commissioner Kenneth Hayne called for a phased rollout of the regime, with the next step covering superannuation (pension) providers. The BEAR legislation was introduced in 2018 to make senior financial executives including (Chief Information Officers and Chief Technical officers) personally accountable for IT compliance.

FlexNOW Migrates to AWS Cloud

FlexTrade Systems has made its FlexNOW execution management system available on Amazon Web Services (AWS) in a move to reduce latency for global clients. The Amazon platform will raise FlexNOW’s status as an innovative trading platform by decreasing onboarding time for clients and brokers while allowing their product teams to easily test new ideas, such as STP APIs, mobile access and analytics.

Rhyd Lewis, FlexNOW product manager, says: “With FlexNOW deployed on AWS, our clients benefit from increased flexibility, reduced lead-time for new features, and industry leading security and reliability.”

Revolut Agrees Partnership with Clausematch

UK digital bank Revolut has partnered with London-based RegTech firm ClauseMatch to streamline the management of its internal policies, controls and regulatory compliance. The partnership was confirmed after a trial period of several months where ClauseMatch assisted Revolut to map regulations to internal policies and identify potential automation of risk and compliance functions.

In 2017 ClauseMatch partnered with Barclays to help the bank with global policy management and compliance.

Broadridge Acquires PivotData and Sol Hedge Regulatory Reporting Functions

Global fintech provider Broadridge Financial Solutions has acquired certain private fund regulatory reporting capabilities from New York-based PivotData, a data warehouse and compliance reporting solutions platform for the investment community, and its partner Sol Hedge. Broadridge will leverage their capabilities to help private fund asset managers meet their regulatory reporting requirements.

“PivotData and Sol Hedge’s proprietary data transformation, normalization and load (ETL) processes and in-house compliance experience will provide clients with a reliable, cost-effective and timely regulatory reporting solution,” said the firm.

Cube Joins MetLife Japan for RegTech Pilot

Global regulatory intelligence provider Cube has been selected by MetLife Insurance to take part in a regulatory intelligence and change management pilot project at its Asia innovation centre LumenLab, as part of its open innovation programme, Collab 4.0. The program invites six finalists (from around 140 applicants across 40 countries) to compete for a JPY10 million ($91,000) contract to pilot their solutions with the firm’s Japan business.

CUBE is an enterprise-scale platform that leverages AI to capture financial services regulatory intelligence and automate the process of managing regulatory change.

Wedbush Futures Switches to Trillium Surveyor for Trade Surveillance

Los Angeles-based Wedbush Futures, one of the largest non-bank Futures Commission Merchants (FCM) in the US, is switching from legacy products to Trillium’s Surveyor platform for trade surveillance. The Surveyor software qualifies alerts using full depth-of-book market data. It also offers next-generation detection, visualisation and workflow functionality to keep up with today’s demands for surveillance.