Five Rings Joins BMLL Client Product Advisory Board

Financial data and analytics provider BMLL has welcomed proprietary trading firm Five Rings to its Client Product Advisory Board (CPAB). The New York-based firm will contribute its technological and market structure expertise to help shape BMLL’s future product roadmap, supporting the board’s mission to elevate historical market data standards across the industry.

Five Rings utilizes the BMLL Data Lab, a scalable Python research sandbox providing access to Level 3 order book data, alongside the BMLL Data Feed for flexible delivery. The trading firm relies on this high-fidelity data to explore market opportunities and enhance its quantitative research workflows across various asset classes. This includes utilizing BMLL’s Options Price Reporting Authority (OPRA) options data, which has been available since November 2024 and features over seven years of historical, nanosecond unconflated data.

Launched in February 2025, the CPAB serves as a collaborative forum aligning sovereign wealth funds, asset managers, banks, liquidity providers, and proprietary trading firms. Member firms work together to define best-in-class data symbology, normalization protocols, and delivery methods for the wider market. BMLL’s global historical data coverage currently spans more than 100 trading venues across equities, ETFs, futures, and US equity options, including 100% of the MSCI World Index.

DTCC and Stellar Development Foundation Partner to Tokenize Real-World Assets

The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) and the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) have announced a partnership to enable the tokenization of assets custodied by The Depository Trust Company (DTC) on the Stellar network. This collaboration follows an SEC No-Action Letter received in December 2025, which authorized DTC to implement a new service for digital asset tokenization. The initiative aims to provide market participants with faster settlement, greater asset mobility, and reduced costs while maintaining identical investor protections and safeguards as traditionally held securities.

The integration is projected to launch in the first half of 2027, supporting the rapid conversion of traditional assets alongside full lifecycle management, corporate actions, and reporting. In the interim, both organizations will collaborate to evaluate tokenization use cases for highly liquid asset classes. This will include constituents of the Russell 1000, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) tracking major indices, and U.S. Treasury bills, bonds, and notes, ensuring full compliance with DTC’s regulatory obligations.

Duco’s Post-Trade Agents Seen Substantially Reducing Reconciliation Times

Duco has launched an agentic operations platform for post-trade workflows.
The platform relies on an engine that processes 20 billion transactions monthly for more than 200 clients, the financial services data automation provider said.

Ten firms are using the autonomous agents in production, benefiting from a decrease in the time required to build a new reconciliation process from two days to four hours.

Chief executive officer and co-founder Christian Nentwich said clients are reporting that agents will run a meaningful share of post-trade operations within three years.

National Bank of Greece in Cyprus Goes Live with Smartstream AI Reconciliation Solution

Smartstream, the data solutions provider for global financial institutions, has announced that the National Bank of Greece (NBG) in Cyprus has successfully deployed its AI-enabled reconciliation solution, Air. The bank has implemented Air’s Cash module to consolidate four separate legacy reconciliation systems used for Instant, Cash, SEPA, and Nostro transactions into a single platform.

Prior to this deployment, NBG in Cyprus managed a fragmented operational landscape. Although transaction volumes were manageable, the bank required significant daily manual effort to process items individually and navigate multiple data formats. The transition to the unified platform aims to eliminate these complexities and reduce manual processing requirements.

NBG in Cyprus selected Smartstream’s Air following a market review, opting for its self-service model and AI automation to better utilise internal resources. The platform’s ability to create reconciliation groups allows multiple items to be matched simultaneously rather than individually, delivering measurable efficiency gains from day one.

Avelacom Launches Low-Latency Connectivity Route Between Bangkok and Tokyo

Avelacom, the ultra-low latency connectivity and infrastructure provider, has launched a direct network route between Bangkok and Tokyo. By optimizing the terrestrial fibre segment, the company has established a more direct path between Thailand and Japan, achieving a round-trip delay (RTD) of less than 65 milliseconds.

The new route specifically supports low-latency connectivity between the Thailand Futures Exchange and CME derivatives markets, with a focus on gold and foreign exchange (FX) market data and trading. It caters to proprietary trading firms, institutional trading desks, and regional banks operating across global equity, FX, commodity, and derivatives markets, where deterministic network performance directly influences execution efficiency.

This infrastructure expansion addresses the growing demand for reliable, high-performance connectivity as Bangkok solidifies its position as a regional financial and trading hub. The route further integrates into Avelacom’s broader global network, which links major traditional and digital asset trading venues across Europe, North America, the Middle East, and the Asia-Pacific region.

Pacer Advisors Implements Bloomberg’s Order and Execution Management Solutions

Pacer Advisors has successfully implemented Bloomberg’s multi-asset order and execution management solutions (OEMSs) to automate its investment workflow. The integration includes Bloomberg Asset and Investment Manager (AIM) alongside EMSX, its multi-asset execution management system. This setup streamlines Pacer’s position management, trade execution, and compliance processes.

As part of the deployment, Bloomberg introduced the Rule Builder (RBLD) Optimizer to assist Pacer’s traders and portfolio managers during ETF rebalances. Integrated with AIM’s portfolio management functionality, the automated trading tool allows users to compare portfolios against benchmarks and generate automated orders. This replaces a traditional, manual “Broker Wheel” approach by evaluating entire order baskets simultaneously across multiple constraints, such as broker commissions, share distribution, and liquidity footprints.

The fully integrated solution enables complex baskets to be allocated and released to brokers in coordinated, single-click batches. By transitioning from hours of manual calculations to automated, dollar-neutral execution, the system reduces cash drag and overnight risk. Ultimately, the implementation lowers operational complexity and provides scalable execution for high-volume ETF portfolios.

Shield Adds Analytics Layer and Faster Review Workflow to Surveillance Platform

Shield has added two capabilities to its communications surveillance and archiving platform, aiming to help compliance teams improve alert review efficiency while giving senior leaders clearer evidence of surveillance performance.

The updates include Shield Insights, a premium analytics layer for compliance operations, and a redesigned reviewer experience that Shield says can reduce alert review time by up to 50%. The additions respond to a familiar operating challenge for surveillance teams: rising alert volumes, limited reviewer capacity and growing pressure to evidence programme effectiveness to regulators. Shield points to recent industry survey data indicating that 93% of financial institutions cite high false positive volumes as a significant challenge, while fewer than 0.02% of alerts progress beyond Level 1 review.

Shield Insights is designed to give compliance and operations leaders a more consistent view of surveillance performance across metrics such as alert rates, review coverage, reviewer productivity and workload distribution. The aim is to reduce reliance on manual reporting processes and parallel reporting workflows that can create data-quality and integration issues. By structuring raw surveillance data into standardised operational metrics, the analytics layer gives firms a clearer basis for tracking key performance indicators, evidencing review coverage and preparing for regulatory exams.

The reviewer workflow update focuses on the operational bottleneck at the point of alert investigation. Shield says the redesigned experience removes unnecessary navigation and visual clutter, putting relevant context in front of reviewers more quickly while preserving detection logic, model governance and regulatory auditability. The company says the release is embedded into existing workflows and does not require workflow redesign.

“Compliance teams are being asked to operate at a higher standard than ever before – managing more alerts, more channels, and more complexity, while proving program effectiveness to regulators with measurable evidence,” said Tamar Sharir Beiser, Chief Product Officer at Shield. “These innovations meet that reality at every level of the function – equipping compliance leaders with the performance intelligence to measure and demonstrate program impact, while empowering reviewers with faster, clearer workflows. This pincer approach reflects where the industry is heading and where Shield is leading.”

Data Governance Underpinnings of AI Still Lacking Says EDM Association

The EDM Association’s 2026 Global Data Management Benchmark Report states that organizations including financial institutions are increasing investment in artificial intelligence while failing to build the necessary data and governance foundations.

The findings are based on a survey of more than 435 organizations across more than 50 countries. President of the EDM Association John Bottega said AI is becoming a stress test for enterprise data.The study

indicates that 31 per cent of surveyed organizations report advanced data strategy capabilities and 19 per cent demonstrate mature adoption of analytics. The organisation also launched a benchmark repository and dashboard, following previous benchmark studies aligned to its data management capability assessment model framework.

Financial Institutions Among Targets for Motif’s AI-led Wealth Data Platform

Artificial intelligence wealth advisory company Motif has launched an artificial intelligence financial intelligence system called Clarity, which tracks links between markets, assets and financial relationships alongside how and why they alter over time.

Financial institutions can combine the platform into products to allow customers to make investment decisions, whilst analysts and product teams can use it to track market changes.

Co-founder and chief executive officer Mario Leoni said AI products in financial services retrieve information rather than understand it. Multiple financial institutions signed contracts before the launch, representing more than 1.5 million users.

Arcesium Adds AI-led Arcesium Intelligence to Platform

Arcesium has embedded Arcesium Intelligence, an artificial intelligence platform for institutional investment, into its data management and operations platforms to enable firms to deploy automated workflows.

Users can access a library of more than 100 pre-configured agents or build custom applications using a self-service development platform.

The platform gives firms the control, context and flexibility to make AI a core part of how they operate across the investment lifecycle, Arcesium chief executive Gaurav Suri said.

The software automates processes such as net asset value reviews, portfolio monitoring and data quality monitoring within firm-defined governance parameters.

The launch follows the release of AI features in December, which included unstructured data processing capabilities and a model context protocol server.