ISS ESG Adds Biodiversity Data to Fund Rating and Screening Tools

ISS ESG has incorporated nature-focussed data into its ESG funds assessment tool.

Investors can use the ISS ESG Biodiversity Fund Screening dataset to establish the risks from nature and water loss faced by equity and bond funds. It expands the sustainable investing arm of ISS STOXX’s Fund Rating and Fund Screening tools, which offer clients a broad spectrum of ESG assessments of their holdings.

“ISS ESG has applied its extensive ESG research and data management expertise to enhance its ESG Fund Rating thematic coverage, developing a broad and deep dataset to help support a wide range of investor use cases,” said Till Jung, head of ESG business at ISS STOXX.

SG Fund Rating can be accessed via its DataDesk and through data feeds, APIs and the cloud. It is built on 2,600 ESG data factors.

Informatica to Manage Data, Governance for Lenders Mortgage Insurer Helia

Helia, an Australian lenders mortgage insurer, has selected Informatica to improve data management and governance around its claims processing capabilities as the home loans sector sees a surge in digitalisation.

Sydney-headquartered Helia said the artificial intelligence (AI)-powered data services company would help it accelerate claims and streamline its data pipeline. It hopes that the using Informatica’s Intelligent Data management Cloud will also enable the company to enhance its customer engagement using chatbots and automated decision making.

“By taking control of our data and implementing AI-powered data governance, we’re building a foundation to surpass our customers’ expectations and maximise value from AI,” said Michelle Soakell-Ho, data governance leader at Helia.

SteelEye Integrates Trade Surveillance with AI-Powered Compliance CoPilot

Integrated surveillance provider, SteelEye has expanded Compliance CoPilot by integrating its trade surveillance capabilities. Leveraging advanced large language models (LLMs), the enhanced tool provides automation, intelligent analysis and actionable insights, enabling compliance practitioners to prioritize high-risk alerts and streamline their review workflow. 

By intelligently scoring and prioritizing alerts, the Compliance CoPilot allows analysts to focus on the most critical risks, significantly reducing manual review time by up to 90%. Compliance CoPilot has been in production for communications surveillance since November 2023, the AI-powered integration with trade surveillance now offers comprehensive alert explanations and provides recommendations for categorizing and resolving alerts, complete with rationales. 

The increasing interconnectedness and complexity of financial markets have empowered wrongdoers to adopt more sophisticated market manipulation tactics, such as cross-product manipulation—a form of abuse where trades in one product are used to manipulate the price of another. See the recent RegTech Insight story on SteelEye’s Cross-product manipulation detection capability.  

Surveillance teams face the dual challenge of detecting these advanced abuses while managing a surge in alert volumes amid tightening budget constraints. “Compliance staff are under immense strain, overwhelmed by volumes of suspicious trading alerts each day,” said Matt Storey, Chief Product Officer at SteelEye. “The ability to prioritize the most important alerts is essential for bolstering firms’ risk management practices. The Compliance CoPilot empowers teams to operate more effectively and proactively, becoming the go-to sidekick for surveillance officers.” 

According to SteelEye’s 2024 Annual Compliance Health Check Report, spending on compliance has decreased significantly compared to 2023, even as market abuses like cross-product manipulation become more prevalent. With a 30% increase in reported market abuse cases this year, firms are under more pressure than ever to improve their surveillance capabilities. By allowing firms to intelligently manage their workload and focus on the most urgent alerts, the AI-enabled assistant enhances the efficiency and accuracy of surveillance functions. It also affords firms more time to assess and strengthen their market surveillance capabilities on a broader scale. 

Built with compliance-specific AI, the Compliance CoPilot provides transparent explanations and rationales for its recommendations, ensuring trust in its operations. The tool integrates seamlessly into existing workflows for SteelEye users, offering an immediate boost to their surveillance operations without disrupting established processes. 

In an era of escalating market complexities and tighter budgets, SteelEye’s enhanced Compliance CoPilot offers a comprehensive tool for firms aiming to stay ahead of sophisticated market manipulation tactics. For more insights from the 2024 Compliance Health Check Report, visit the SteelEye website. 

S&P Global Market Intelligence Launches GenAI-Enabled Solutions to Enhance Research and Analysis

S&P Global Market Intelligence has introduced a suite of generative AI (GenAI)-enabled solutions to support client research and analysis. These innovations are available via the new Labs section of the S&P Capital IQ Pro platform, which showcases both developed and early-stage technologies from S&P Global and Kensho. Key offerings include Transcripts Trending Topics, which helps users identify trends in earnings call transcripts, and News Sentiment, which provides quantitative insights based on sentiment analysis. Another tool, Transcripts Key Phrases, highlights significant topics from earnings calls to assist users in understanding key company themes.

Additional GenAI enhancements include IQ Market Summaries, offering timely updates on U.S., European, and Asian markets, as well as Transcript Summarization, which generates earnings call summaries. The S&P Global Marketplace GenAI Search simplifies the querying process, helping users quickly find relevant data across S&P Global’s datasets. These tools aim to streamline workflows and boost analytical efficiency.

SC Ventures Leads Strategic Investment in One Trading to Launch First Crypto Perpetual Futures in EU

SC Ventures, the innovation and fintech investment arm of Standard Chartered, has made a strategic investment in One Trading, the European crypto-asset exchange. The investment round also saw participation from existing investor MiddleGame Ventures, alongside Valar and SpeedInvest. Although the financial details were not disclosed, the funds will support One Trading’s launch of the first crypto perpetual futures in the European Union (EU) as a MiFID II-compliant trading venue.

In July 2024, One Trading secured an Organised Trading Facility (OTF) license from the Dutch financial market regulator, making it the first regulated crypto perpetual futures exchange in the EU. This approval enables the exchange to offer crypto derivatives, accessible to both retail and institutional clients, marking a significant milestone in One Trading’s efforts to bring onshore crypto futures trading within the EU regulatory framework.

BGC Group to Launch FMX Futures Exchange for U.S. Interest Rate Futures

BGC Group, Inc, in collaboration with ten leading global investment banks and market-making firms, has announced the launch of the FMX Futures Exchange (FMX) for U.S. interest rate futures. The new exchange will go live on Monday, 23 September 2024, at 9:00 p.m. ET, initially offering Secured Overnight Financing Rate (SOFR) futures, with plans to introduce U.S. Treasury futures in early 2025.

FMX aims to deliver capital savings to its clients through its clearing partnership with LCH Limited, a major clearer of interest rate swaps. LCH will facilitate cross-margining for eligible U.S. interest rate futures using $225 billion in collateral held by its members. FMX is a subsidiary of FMX Holdings LLC, whose equity owners include prominent financial institutions such as Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and J.P. Morgan. The company also operates in the U.S. Treasuries and foreign exchange markets.

Broadridge Expands Distributed Ledger Repo Platform with Tier-1 Canadian Bank Implementation

Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc. has announced that a Tier-1 Canadian bank has implemented its Distributed Ledger Repo (DLR) platform to manage High-Quality Liquid Asset (HQLA) treasury securities. This marks a significant milestone as the bank becomes the first to adopt this use case on Broadridge’s DLR platform, highlighting the potential of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) in revolutionising financial operations.

This implementation aims to not only simplify the bank’s workflow and generate cost savings but also lay the foundation for further DLT use cases that can drive greater efficiencies and innovation in the financial sector, according to the company.

As more firms embrace digital transformation strategies, Broadridge continues to deploy DLT to drive operational efficiencies and cost savings. The DLR platform is expanding globally across buy-side and sell-side firms, generating a network effect that supports diverse transaction types.

Bloomberg Lets Customers Test Drive its Datasets

Bloomberg is throwing open its data trove to prospective users, enabling them to interact with the information before deciding on whether to buy into new datasets.

The Virtual Data Room will give customers the chance to explore the coverage, quality and usability of Bloomberg’s Bulk Data License datasets. The service is designed to accelerate the data onboarding process, which usually takes a minimum of three months, New York-based Bloomberg said.

“The Virtual Data Room is akin to test driving a new car before you buy it,” said Brian Doherty, Global Head of Data License at Bloomberg.

BlueFlame AI Applies GenAI to Alternative Markets Data Processes

BlueFlame AI said it has made the process of mining and analysing data from documents easier for private and other alternative market participants with the creation of its Nexus product.

The offering, backed by generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), enables clients to pull critical data from unstructured sources such as management and board decks, presentations, contracts, reports and other documents, the London-based company said.

“In today’s data-driven investment landscape, the ability to quickly extract valuable insights from vast amounts of unstructured information is crucial,” BlueFlame AI chief executive Raj Bakhru said.

NeoXam’s Impress Deployed to Manage Ecofi Reporting Process

NeoXam has been selected to handle the entire reporting process for Ecofi, Groupe Credit Cooperatif’s asset manager.

The France-based financial software and technology provider has signed a deal to deploy its SaaS-based Impress platform to manage the French banking group’s data collection, quality checks, performance analytics computation as well as reporting templating and generation for the full range of its funds.