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A-Team Insight Brief

SimCorp Chosen as AllianceBernstein’s Investment Tech Provider

Investment management firm AllianceBernstein has selected SimCorp as its core investment technology partner in an agreement that will see the implementation of the SimCorp One platform to serve as front-to-back infrastructure for the firm.

This transition aims to provide investment teams with centralised, real-time data and proprietary tools for trading.

The firm’s platforms will be unified on a single investment platform to serve global clients, Karl Sprules, Chief Operating Officer of AllianceBernstein, said.

The multi-year phased rollout of the system is underway, starting with the core investment data platform.

Quest Unveils Data Platform to Automate Multiple Capabilities

Quest Software has launched the Trusted Data Management Platform featuring the Automated Data Product Factory, a software-as-a-service product that unifies data modelling, cataloguing, governance, quality and a data marketplace into a single interface.

The system uses artificial intelligence and natural language prompts to automate the creation of production-ready data assets for corporate use.

The platform is designed to deliver simplicity through automation by unifying multiple capabilities in a converged offering, chief executive Tim Page said.

Users can reduce the time required to create data products from weeks to days, potentially lowering delivery costs by 40 per cent, the company said.

ITRS and BSE Announce Strategic Partnership to Enhance Trading Infrastructure Monitoring

ITRS, the real-time IT observability solutions provider, has entered into a strategic partnership with BSE (formerly the Bombay Stock Exchange), Asia’s oldest stock exchange. BSE will deploy the ITRS Geneos solution to provide comprehensive monitoring across its entire trading infrastructure. This collaboration is a key component of BSE’s broader modernisation strategy, designed to bolster operational resilience as infrastructure demands scale.

The implementation of ITRS Geneos, supported by the ITRS Analytics platform, will provide BSE with end-to-end visibility across its critical trading components. This technical integration aims to improve uptime Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and ensure business continuity through faster identification and resolution of potential system issues. By adopting this proactive monitoring framework, BSE is establishing a modernised command centre approach to its daily operations.

Furthermore, the partnership ensures that BSE remains aligned with the operational resilience guidelines set by the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI). By moving away from legacy monitoring methods, the exchange is better positioned to meet evolving regulatory requirements and the rigorous performance standards of the modern financial markets.

Eurex Enhances Market Access Following German Legislative Reform

The German Financial Centre Promotion Act has introduced a refined regulatory framework intended to simplify how non-EU firms participate in the European derivatives market. Effective immediately, third-country Regulatory Market-Makers (RMMs) are no longer required to establish a physical entity in Germany or seek individual exemptions to provide liquidity. This legislative shift removes a primary operational and financial hurdle, streamlining the onboarding process for international firms.

By reducing bureaucracy and lowering entry barriers, the reform aims to boost international participation and increase liquidity on German-regulated exchanges like Eurex. The change aligns Germany with other major European jurisdictions, ensuring a level playing field for global participants. Eurex, part of the Deutsche Börse Group, is now actively engaging with firms across the UK, Switzerland, North America, and Asia to facilitate their transition under this new framework.

This enhancement forms part of a broader strategy to strengthen Germany’s status as a global financial hub. It complements Eurex’s existing initiatives, such as its Sponsored Access model and liquidity provider programmes, to foster a more efficient and competitive trading environment.

Broadridge’s Distributed Ledger Repo Platform Records $7.3 Trillion in Monthly Volume

Broadridge Financial Solutions has reported a significant surge in activity on its Distributed Ledger Repo (DLR) platform, processing a daily average of $365 billion in transactions throughout January 2026. Total monthly volumes reached $7.3 trillion, representing a 508% year-over-year increase compared to January 2025. This growth highlights the accelerating institutional adoption of tokenised real-asset settlement and the platform’s ability to sustain large-scale momentum.

The platform is expanding beyond foundational workflows into more complex institutional applications, such as sponsored and intraday repo. These advancements facilitate the efficient movement of high-quality collateral and allow for greater precision in liquidity management. By providing these tools, the platform helps firms reduce financing costs and improve overall liquidity within the securities lending market.

In 2026, Broadridge intends to further scale the DLR platform by focusing on intraday funding and enhanced collateral mobility across a broader range of tokenised asset classes. The firm aims to bridge the gap between traditional and digital financial ecosystems while ensuring the interoperability and resilience necessary for global capital markets.

LSEG to Launch Digital Securities Depository for On-Chain Settlement

London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) has announced plans to develop the LSEG Digital Securities Depository (DSD), an on-chain settlement capability designed for institutional market participants. Scheduled for a 2026 launch subject to regulatory approval, the DSD will function as a fully interoperable infrastructure. It aims to bridge traditional and digital markets by supporting multiple blockchains and ensuring seamless interaction between existing settlement platforms and new digital frameworks.

The DSD will build upon LSEG’s existing Digital Markets Infrastructure (DMI), a Microsoft Azure-powered platform currently used for fund tokenisation. The new capability is intended to enhance collateral management and improve liquidity access across various asset classes, including equities, fixed income, and private markets. This move aligns with LSEG’s long-term vision of a financial ecosystem where the majority of securities are tokenised to increase transparency and operational efficiency.

To support the transition, LSEG is establishing a strategic partner group to integrate market feedback into the development process. This collaboration seeks to scale the infrastructure and facilitate the trading and settlement of both digitally native assets and digital representations of traditional securities. Members of this partnership group will be confirmed at a later date.

Deutsche Börse Group to Acquire Remaining 20% Stake in ISS STOXX

Deutsche Börse Group has reached an agreement to acquire the remaining 20% minority stake in ISS STOXX from the global investor General Atlantic. This transaction marks the final step in a strategic partnership that began with the acquisition of Axioma in 2019 and the subsequent integration of ISS’s ESG solutions with the STOXX index business in 2023. By moving to full ownership, Deutsche Börse aims to simplify its growth strategy and enhance market connectivity for its data, analytics, and index offerings.

The total purchase price of approximately €1.1 billion is based on a pre-agreed valuation of roughly 20 times the adjusted EBITDA of ISS STOXX. The payment will be structured in two tranches, with €731 million due in February 2026 and the balance payable in March 2026. Deutsche Börse intends to fund the buyout using existing cash and debt financing. Despite the significant investment, the group expects to maintain its AA- long-term credit rating and anticipates a low single-digit increase in cash earnings per share during the first year of full ownership.

General Atlantic’s exit is expected to be finalised by the end of March 2026, fulfilling a dual-track agreement that allowed for a private sale in the absence of an IPO. To maintain market integrity, Deutsche Börse has confirmed that ISS’s research and advisory services will continue to function under existing non-interference policies. This acquisition reinforces the Group’s focus on providing mission-critical tools for the buy-side while ensuring operational agility across its premier data brands.

Oracle Agentic Platform Targets Banks, Financial Companies

Oracle has launched a new agentic platform for the banking and finance sector, featuring applications and pre-built artificial intelligence agents designed to automate customer engagement and business processes across digital and branch channels.

The agents operate within an architecture that maintains human oversight for decision-making and ethical governance, the enterprise software and cloud services provider said.

“By combining domain specific AI, human-in-the-loop governance, and enterprise grade scalability, we’re enabling banks to drive proactive, hyper-personalised engagement while innovating responsibly and competitively,” said Sovan Shatpathy, senior vice president at Oracle Financial Services.

The system features specific tools for loan originations, application tracking and credit decision-making to improve operational speed.

Alkymi Builds Private Credit Data Extraction Tool

Alkymi, an AI-powered data specialist for private investors, has launched Alkymi Private Credit to automate the extraction of data from unstructured documents to assist with risk management and compliance within the private credit market.The release follows projections that the private credit sector will expand to US$5 trillion dollars by 2029, increasing the complexity of manual data processing.

“Private credit is scaling faster than the infrastructure that supports it,” chief executive Harald Collet said. “Alkymi Private Credit was built specifically to address this challenge, combining AI automation with enterprise-grade controls to give firms continuous visibility into their portfolios, including covenant tracking so they can modernise operations without compromising accuracy or regulatory requirements.”

The platform centralises inbound documents like loan agent notices and financial statements to produce structured datasets for portfolio and accounting systems.

SOLVE Launches AI-Powered Confidence Score for Corporate Bond Pricing

SOLVE, the provider of fixed income market data, has introduced Confidence Score for Corporate Bonds to its SOLVE Px™ platform. This AI-driven metric quantifies pricing uncertainty on a scale of 1 to 10, providing a transparent layer to predictive pricing for over 250,000 investment-grade and high-yield corporate bonds. The tool translates complex model uncertainty into an intuitive framework, allowing professionals to assess the reliability of predicted prices for Bid, Mid, and Offer valuations.

The metric categorises scores into low, medium, and high confidence levels, which are colour-coded within the SOLVE Quotes Web application for rapid assessment. Higher scores typically reflect bonds with recent trading activity and active quoting, while lower scores indicate less liquid securities. Crucially, the tool covers the entire corporate bond universe, including highly illiquid assets and trades of all sizes, enabling risk management and trading teams to make more defensible, data-backed decisions.

Confidence Score is now integrated across all SOLVE Px delivery methods, including API endpoints, Excel add-ins, and FIX feeds. This launch follows the previous rollout of similar tools for municipal bonds and marks a further step in the company’s expansion of predictive pricing capabilities. By pairing price predictions with measurable uncertainty indicators, the service aims to reduce ambiguity and improve workflow efficiency across the fixed income markets.