Finantix has released the results of a wealth management market survey, ‘New Client Acquisition: How can technology drive sales effectiveness in wealth management’. The survey shows a shift by wealth managers towards a more digital approach to client acquisition: 87% said they will increase digital lead generation in the next 24 months, with 54% making the digital route top priority. Some 75% of tier one multi-market mangers are prioritising digital lead generation, compared to 33% of single-market firms. There is also increasing need for technologies to help build a single view of each client and prospect and drive personalised insights.

The Financial Stability Board (FSB) has published a report on governance arrangements for the Unique Product Identifier (UPI). The UPI will uniquely identify the product involved in OTC derivatives transactions reported to trade repositories. This will help authorities aggregate data on OTC derivatives transactions by product, allowing the effective use of OTC derivatives trade reporting data to help authorities assess systemic risk and detect market abuse. The Legal Entity Identifier Regulatory Oversight Committee (LEI ROC) will become the International Governance Body for the UPI and Unique Transaction Identifier (UTI). The UPI Technical Guidance should be implemented by Q3 2022.

Refinitiv continues to build its commitment to the wealth management industry through a strategic partnership with SigFig, an enterprise financial technology firm. The partnership delivers digital advice technology solutions to institutional users of Refinitiv’s BETA clearing and custody platform and will enable SigFig and Refinitiv to deliver an integrated, end-to-end digital advice experience for investors that supports efficient and automated investment management. This is based on SigFig’s direct-to-consumer platform technology that can be used to create an end-to-end robo advice solution, featuring account opening, automated investment management, money movement and return client experience for institutional clients.

IHS Markit research among asset managers in Europe and North America shows an industry segment becoming more strategic in its approach to data management, but not immune to problems including mounting fees, rising costs and demanding regulations. The research notes 52% of firms use the cloud for data management and a further 28% plan to migrate in the next 18 months. Almost half of firms will have a data warehouse within two years, but two-thirds report that business teams have limited/no visibility of where data came from, who touched it, how it was altered and where it went.

Volante Technologies has introduced financial message validation on the cloud. It is available as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) on the AWS Marketplace as a microservice to users looking to test their SWIFT Standards Release (SR) 2019 messages ahead of go-live on November 17, 2019. The validation service provides APIs for validating messages ready for applications to use. The service not only identifies valid/invalid messages, but also returns a list of errors encountered. This helps reduce the frequency and severity of formatting errors, and minimises the risk of rejected messages. The cost of the service is based on hourly use.

Broadridge Financial Solutions has made its global asset servicing solution available on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. A global Tier 1 investment bank is in live operation with the solution and another is onboarding. The company’s end-to-end solution is designed to address industry, business and operational challenges in global asset servicing by streamlining corporate actions, dividend and coupon processing across multiple asset classes, business lines and regions. Operating the solution on AWS can add increased operational agility, improved and faster client onboarding, quicker deployments, and enhanced security, scale, and resilience.

Axioma, a provider of enterprise risk management, portfolio management and regulatory reporting solutions, has added a new Canada equity risk model (AXCA4) to its next-generation Equity Factor Risk Model suite. The release builds on existing risk models, offering enhanced country-specific content to meet the risk-management needs of investors. The estimation universe for the Canada model contains over 440 stocks and ETFs, with coverage history from 1995. The enhanced data includes deep daily history and, for the first time, macro factors for residual gold and oil sensitivity.

Exchange Data International (EDI), a provider of corporate actions, pricing and reference data, has introduced Worldwide Equity Cost Basis, a service that enables users to track both a security’s cost basis, its evolution and its descendant’s cost basis and evolution up to the current date. The service is part of the company’s expansion into value added services.

Bloomberg has acquired RegTek.Solutions, a specialist in global regulatory reporting software solutions. The firm, which provides modular software solutions built around actionable regulatory intelligence, will be integrated with Bloomberg’s Regulatory Reporting Hub (RHUB), as well as Bloomberg’s enterprise data management and trading systems. The acquisition will combine Bloomberg’s data enrichment and reporting capabilities with RegTek.Solutions’ quality and control tools across a broad range of global reporting jurisdictions. Clients will have access to a fully electronic reporting workflow including transaction reporting eligibility, data validation, enrichment and reconciliation. Further news to follow.

The SmartStream Reference Data Utility (RDU) has implemented changes to its MiFID II Reference Data Service and Systematic Internaliser (SI) Registry to accommodate Brexit. For the MiFID II service, SmartStream RDU will make both ESMA and FCA data available, either as an integrated delivery or separately. It will also support ESMA and FCA pre- and post-trade reporting through its cloud-based REST API service. The SI registry has been proactively enhanced to indicate whether an individual SI status is relevant to ESMA reporting, FCA reporting or both.