Clearstream Partners with Ares to Boost Access to Private Markets

Clearstream, the post-trade business of Deutsche Börse Group, has partnered with alternative investment manager Ares Management Corporation to add Ares’ private market strategies to its fund platform. The collaboration aims to simplify the investment process for fund distributors, allowing them to access private market investments with the same operational efficiency as traditional mutual funds.

For Ares, the integration opens up a broad distribution network that connects the firm with diverse wealth management sectors, including family offices and private banks. This alignment supports Ares’ strategy to make private market assets a core component of diversified portfolios for a wider range of investors.

The initiative also aligns with wider regulatory goals within Europe. By unlocking private savings for broader investment opportunities, the partnership directly supports the European Union’s objective to establish a stronger Savings and Investment Union (SIU) and deepen continent-wide capital markets.

Zema Global and Natural Gas Intelligence Enhance North American Energy Data Partnership

Zema Global and Natural Gas Intelligence (NGI) have announced an enhanced data partnership designed to provide energy market participants with expanded natural gas pricing and flow data. Building on an existing seven-year relationship, the collaboration integrates NGI’s extensive datasets into Zema Global’s Decisioning Infrastructure to support curve analytics, portfolio valuation, trading, and risk management in the North American markets.

Under the expanded agreement, Zema Global customers can access NGI data covering more than 150 monthly and 170 daily physical natural gas price indexes across the US and Canada, alongside over 80 forward price curves and 40 Mexican price locations. The partnership also introduces additional NGI datasets, including North American LNG flow indicators, shale basin pricing, pipeline flow data, and indicative intraday pricing.

Furthermore, the integration includes NGI’s Entropic Analytics pipeline flows, which capture and normalise over 20,000 daily flow data points from more than 180 interstate North American pipelines. This data automation reduces manual ingestion and improves enterprise system consistency. The collaboration is also structured to support future customer demand, allowing Zema Global to develop new data processors in response to evolving client requirements.

Exegy Expands Axiom Market Data Feed to Cover Key Middle Eastern Exchanges

Exegy has expanded its real-time consolidated market data feed, Axiom, to include key Middle Eastern exchanges. The update introduces coverage for markets in Saudi Arabia (TASI), Qatar (QSE), Kuwait (KSE), Abu Dhabi (ADX), and Dubai (DFM). This data is delivered with low latency via Exegy’s London Points of Presence (PoP) at the Equinix LD4 and Digital Realty LON2 data centres, complementing the firm’s existing regional coverage of Johannesburg, Tel Aviv, and Istanbul.

The expanded service allows institutional trading firms to access normalised data for more than 300 global venues across equities, indices, derivatives, and digital assets using a unified model. Axiom supports both Level 1 and full-depth order books through XCAPI or MAMA APIs. To assist latency-sensitive trading strategies, the platform tracks daily latency across four critical processing points, from the venue to the client’s application.

Operating on a market-data-as-a-service model, Axiom connects directly to a client’s premises, colocation space, or public cloud platforms. This infrastructure minimises overheads and accelerates time to market for firms increasing their international trading activity. Additionally, the service provides customisable deployment options and 24/7 global support from Exegy’s worldwide hubs.

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.

S&P Global Integrates Energy Insights Into Capital IQ Pro

S&P Global has integrated news and insights from S&P Global Energy into the S&P Capital IQ Pro platform, giving clients AI-powered access to proprietary intelligence across the global energy value chain. The integration is positioned as a response to heightened geopolitical uncertainty and the resulting volatility in global energy markets, which is increasingly feeding through to supply chains, company fundamentals and broader financial markets

Clients now have access to expert coverage across more than 12 industries within the energy ecosystem, including oil and gas, LNG, clean energy, power, metals, chemicals, agriculture and shipping. The content is surfaced through Capital IQ Pro’s generative AI features, including Document Intelligence and ChatIQ, allowing users to connect energy market dynamics to company fundamentals and investment decisions within a single workflow.

FactSet Partners with Valutico to Integrate Private-Markets Valuation into Cobalt

FactSet has announced a partnership with Vienna-based valuation software provider Valutico to deliver an integrated valuation workflow for private capital markets, anchored within FactSet’s Cobalt portfolio monitoring platform.

Under the partnership, portfolio company financials collected in Cobalt flow directly into Valutico’s valuation environment, where analysts can run income-, market- and asset-based methodologies including discounted cash flow (DCF), trading multiples, transaction multiples, venture capital methods and leveraged buyout (LBO) models. Outputs – including enterprise value, equity value and waterfall calculations – flow back into Cobalt and are tracked alongside portfolio performance and reporting. Valutico’s platform draws on FactSet market data, including public company financials, estimates, comps and M&A transaction multiples.

The partnership comes amid a broader push by major data and analytics vendors – including BlackRock with its Aladdin/Preqin integration and JP Morgan with Private Market Data Solutions – to centralise private-markets workflows around a single system of record.

ISI Launches AI-Powered Corporate Debt Intelligence Platform for Emerging Markets

ISI, a global provider of market intelligence, has launched a new platform designed for investors, bankers, and advisers focusing on emerging market corporates. Powered by REDD intelligence and the proprietary AI tool AskISI, the platform covers public bonds, private credit, and primary debt issuance. It aims to provide transparency in opaque markets by surfacing credit risks and event-driven dislocations before they trigger market reactions.

The hub integrates financial data, restructuring developments, and M&A activity for over 2,100 hard-currency corporate bond issuers. It offers deep coverage of high-yield and crossover credits, supported by ten years of historical data and detailed financials for 1,700 companies. Users can utilise AI-driven research to extract insights from more than 7,000 bond prospectuses and documents, significantly reducing manual research time.

This launch follows the introduction of REDD for Sovereign Debt and features a redesigned interface with personalised alerts and custom watchlists. By consolidating fragmented data and local expert insights into a single experience, the platform enables portfolio managers and credit analysts to track developments from origination through to secondary market performance.

BridgeWise Utilises X Data in New Wealth-Focused Sentiment Analysis Tool

Wealth management financial technology specialist BridgeWise has collaborated with X to integrate data from the social media platform into its intelligence engine to provide social sentiment analysis for thousands of securities.

The system utilises an API-driven connector and a proprietary framework to convert unstructured data into structured signals for financial institutions. The resultant SentimentWise is a solution intended to allow users to monitor shifts in investor mood and identify trends through the analysis of both fundamental and alternative data. The offering builds on BridgeWise’s acquisition of Context Analytics.

BridgeWise co-founder and chief executive Gaby Diamant said the arrangement turns global conversations into a quantifiable tool to assist investors with decision-making.

“Markets move on more than just numbers; they move on what people are saying, thinking, and feeling in the moment,” Diamant said. “By plugging X’s data stream into our engine alongside our deep fundamental and technical analysis, we’re helping our clients cut through the noise to see what actually matters.”

Sentiment analysis uses algorithms to evaluate public opinion and social media activity to gauge potential market movements.

Fitch Builds Fitch Nexus MCP Connector to Ratings Data

Fitch Solutions has launched a Model Context Protocol (MCP) connector, Fitch Nexus, that enables clients to access Fitch Ratings content through internal AI applications and large language models.

The connector provides credit research, historical ratings data and financial forecasts through a single integration.

“Fitch Nexus is designed to deliver faster, more actionable insights with greater efficiency and immediacy,” said Fitch Solutions chief commercial officer Christopher Sparke. “It reduces the distance between question and answer, enabling our clients to access the signals, commentary, and data they need to inform investment and risk management decisions.”

Future updates will include additional capabilities from CreditSights, BMI, and Sustainable Fitch to expand the available dataset. MCP is an open standard that enables AI assistants to connect with data sources and tools across different platforms.

ExtractAlpha Relaunches AlphaClub Research Workspace with Expanded Signal Coverage

ExtractAlpha has relaunched AlphaClub, its research workspace for investment professionals evaluating the firm’s quantitative stock selection signals and alternative datasets. The update introduces a redesigned interface, broader international coverage, and a workflow-oriented structure aimed at making signal discovery and evaluation more efficient.

The platform is positioned as an environment where hedge fund analysts, portfolio managers, quant teams, and research professionals can explore ExtractAlpha’s offerings, examine how individual signals are constructed, and assess where they might fit within an existing investment process. Updates include faster navigation, cleaner layouts, longer signal histories, and expanded global context across the firm’s datasets.

“AlphaClub is not a data terminal,” says Vinesh Jha, CEO at ExtractAlpha. “It’s a practical research workspace that helps investors understand what our signals are, how they behave, and where they may add value.” This framing is a notable positioning point in a market where evaluation tooling for alternative data signals has tended to lag the sophistication of the signals themselves.

AlphaClub is available via free membership for qualified investment professionals.