A-Team Insight Brief
SIX FinTech Ventures Takes Stake in PXL Vision
SIX FinTech Ventures has acquired a stake in PXL Vision, a Zurich-based start-up offering solutions for online user verification. The company’s Daego solution supports the automatic creation and administration of secure digital identities. It is designed to help companies avoid physical verification processes when onboarding customers, reduce costs and provide a positive experience. The company has established itself in the Swiss market and is focusing on going global.
DTCC Sets SFTR Testing Date
DTCC is scheduled to launch its first phase of SFTR testing for third-party partners in August, ahead of the regulation’s go-live date of April 2020.
Fiserv Automates Horizon Investments’ Portfolio Management
Fiserv, a provider of financial services technology solutions, is supporting Horizon Investments, a provider of goals-based investment management, with its Unified Wealth Platform in order to automate portfolio management, trade and rebalance processes. The platform will allow Horizon to access tools for active portfolio management across multiple managed account programmes and security types, including stocks, bonds, exchange-traded funds and options. The use of Fiserv technology will aid Horizon Investments by providing automation and the ability to scale as the business grows.
big xyt adds Consolidated View
Market data analytics provider big xyt has released Consolidated View, an extension to its market analysis metrics solutions including the Liquidity Cockpit platform and 250days website dashboard. Consolidated View allows access to a standardised independent view of trading activity across the equity and ETF trading landscape in Europe. Users are able to observe changes in displayed liquidity, dark pools, Systematic Internalisers, periodic auctions, and opening and closing auctions. Visible metrics include value traded, market share, spreads, effective spreads and price movement.
Seed CX Selects Corvil to Support Service Performance
Digital asset exchange Seed CX has selected Corvil to deliver trusted and timely intelligence to assure the performance of its platform. Built for institutional investors, Seed CX’s execution and settlement ecosystem seeks to establish a new standard for reliability and performance. Corvil provides visibility across the company’s client access options and proprietary binary protocol. This allows support teams to understand technology infrastructure and trading behaviour as it happens, simplifying the process of responding to order related client queries. The ability to analyse and tune infrastructure performance means Corvil can enable more efficient, effective and proactive operations.
MIK and Itiviti Partner to Deliver OMS Connectivity
MIK Fund Solutions has partnered Itiviti to integrate its OMS with Itiviti’s NYFIX order routing network and give clients access to the NYFIX service delivery platform. MIK is one of 50 buy-side service providers to select NYFIX as their main connectivity partner. Marshall Saffer, chief operations officer at MIK, comments: “When we decided to launch our OMS business, we looked for a connectivity partner and decided that joining Itiviti’s Global Alliance Program was the best option. NYFIX seemed like a natural, comfortable choice for us. It is unconflicted, neutral and reliable and offers a range of services for our clients.”
AxiomSL and Refinitiv Partner on Shareholder Disclosure
AxiomSL has partnered Refinitiv to combine the former’s Global Shareholding Disclosures (GSD) solution with the latter’s reference data. The aim is to enable financial institutions to automatically enrich client positions while managing regulatory obligations across multiple jurisdictions. John Mason, head of pricing and reference data at Refinitiv, says: “Asset managers face challenges in understanding local rules around shareholder disclosures and calculating their own holdings given complexities around voting rights and share classes. This partnership provides a simple solution by combining AxiomSL’s technology with Refinitiv’s global data, enabling asset managers to quickly and easily assess their positions in different instruments.”
Predata Adds Predictive Analytics for US Equities
Predata, a provider of predictive analytics for geopolitical risk, has released a suite of signals for US equities. The signals quantify online attention to each of the 11 S&P equity sectors, as well as constituent companies and macro themes within sectors. Predata provides signals for asset classes including FX and commodities, but this is its first offering for US equities. Customers can use the out-of-the box signals to inform their perspective on equity sectors, from a macro view of sector themes down to a single company. The Predata platform applies machine learning to transform web traffic data into real-world insights.
BattleFin Partners Refinitiv
BattleFin, provider of an alternative data marketplace, has partnered Refinitiv to bring fundamental and reference data to its Ensemble platform. Alternative datasets within Ensemble’s platform will be mapped to Refinitiv’s identifiers, including PermID, to provide a holistic data workflow, helping investors, analysts and data scientists find alpha and new investment strategies. Refinitiv’s desktop research platform Eikon will also integrate workflow tools with Ensemble to improve data discovery for analysts and portfolio managers. Refinitiv customers will be able to access alternative datasets across Refinitiv’s data platforms, including quantitative data management platform QA Direct in the Cloud.
ASX Adds Liquid-Based Cooling Pods at Australian Liquidity Centre
The Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) is opening its first high-density pod at its colocation data centre, the Australian Liquidity Centre (ALC). The pod is designed to meet customer demand for high-density power combined with efficient cooling and can deliver up to 24 kilowatts of power into an individual cabinet. The pod provides customers the same access to ASX markets as standard cabinets and can directly connect to alternative trading venues and liquidity platforms via ASX Net. ASX says demand is strong, with 20% of the space contracted within days of the new service being released.