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.

Over Four in Five UK Firms Now Engaged in T+1 Transition, Survey Reveals

A new market readiness survey by The ValueExchange shows that 83% of UK firms are actively preparing for the transition to a T+1 (one-day) trade settlement cycle, an increase from 66% in the third quarter of 2025. It also places the UK ahead of the US timeline, where only 67% of firms were engaged at a comparable stage before their 2024 transition. The data shows that 90% of firms expect to have their T+1 projects scoped and funded by the end of 2026, ahead of the joint UK and EU deadline on 11 October 2027.

Preparations are heavily focused on automation, which the UK Accelerated Settlement Taskforce has highlighted as crucial for success. Currently, 51% of firms have automated their settlement instruction processing, and 63% aim to finish their automation projects during 2027. Testing is also well-aligned, with 78% of financial market infrastructures prepared to begin industry testing in the first quarter of 2027.

Despite overall progress, the research highlights significant readiness gaps on the buy-side, where 57% of firms have yet to begin development work due to funding and foreign exchange concerns. Respondents also expressed doubts about third-party support; less than half believe their current service providers can support their preparations, and only 19% feel their prime brokers are equipped to do so today. On the sell-side, confidence remains higher, though firms face ongoing hurdles with pre-trade set-up and settlement exceptions.

Clearwater Analytics Launches AI-Enabled Products for Institutional Investment Workflows

Clearwater Analytics has introduced three AI-enabled products built on its investment data platform, which supports more than $10 trillion in global assets. The new solutions – Clearwater Compass, Total Portfolio Oversight, and Fund Analytics – expand the company’s platform across institutional operations, risk management, and private markets workflows. They aim to automate complex tasks and increase operational speed without compromising auditability or control.

Clearwater Compass integrates AI into accounting to automate exception management and accelerate closing processes. It features Smart Suspense, which automatically categorises unapplied cash, and Recon Transparency, which provides live visibility into reconciliation breaks to replace manual email chains. Developed with Blackstone and currently expanding to select beta clients, Total Portfolio Oversight provides a unified view of public and private assets, combining risk exposure, shock analysis, and portfolio query capabilities.

Fund Analytics targets private markets by using AI to extract, validate, and structure data from fragmented general partner reports, PDFs, and spreadsheets. This gives investment teams earlier visibility into portfolio changes, performance metrics, peer benchmarking, and look-through exposures. All three products connect directly to Clearwater’s central investment record to ensure data consistency across workflows.

FIX Trading Community Introduces New Recommended Practices for Algorithm Testing and Certification

The FIX Trading Community has launched its new Recommended Practices for Algorithm Testing and Certification. The guidelines introduce standardised, electronic mechanisms that enable capital markets firms to test, certify, and share algorithmic trading compliance data seamlessly with counterparties and regulators. By establishing uniform workflows and message descriptions, the framework ensures algorithm certificates contain precise, meaningful technical specifications beyond simple identifiers.

The practices cover critical stages of the algorithmic lifecycle, including setting system configurations, executing and orchestrating test runs across diverse platforms, and formalising production readiness through standardised certificates. This comprehensive data structure assists firms in meeting minimum legal requirements while enabling granular information – such as complete test results and clear performance metrics – to be integrated directly into internal algorithm inventory management systems.

Following this release, the FIX Algorithmic Trading Working Group will host an explanatory online workshop in the coming weeks. The group is also shifting its focus toward artificial intelligence, inviting member firms to help shape upcoming standards for agentic workflows, AI governance, and the deployment of FIX over AI-native protocols.

Marathon Asset Management Consolidates Front-to-Back Investment Infrastructure with SimCorp

Marathon Asset Management, the London-based specialist equity manager overseeing more than USD 40 billion in assets, has consolidated its front-to-back investment operations onto the SimCorp One platform. This transition allows the firm to retire its legacy systems and establish a single, unified data layer across its entire business.

The implementation extends an ongoing partnership between the two firms that began in 2010. By streamlining its technology stack, Marathon aims to improve operational efficiency, ensure data consistency, and create a scalable foundation for its investment operations. The system reduces the time required for data reconciliation and technology management, allowing Marathon to focus more heavily on client service and investment decisions driven by its Capital Cycle philosophy.

This consolidation reflects a broader trend within the global investment industry. According to SimCorp’s 2026 InvestOps Report, consolidating technology platforms and vendors is currently the top priority for 58 percent of investment managers globally. Marathon joins several other prominent asset management firms, including Pictet Asset Management, AllianceBernstein, and Lindsell Train, that have recently selected SimCorp to manage their infrastructure.

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.

Gold-i Expands DeFi Access with Derive.xyz Integration on MatrixNET

Trading technology provider Gold-i has integrated Derive.xyz, the largest on-chain options exchange, into its multi-asset liquidity management and distribution platform, MatrixNET. The move marks Gold-i’s second decentralised finance (DeFi) integration, following its recent partnership with the perpetual futures and spot trading platform Hyperliquid.

The integration enables Gold-i’s institutional client base—including brokers, proprietary trading firms, and fund managers—to access Derive’s liquidity pools. This access is supported across several mainstream trading platforms, including MT4, MT5, DXtrade, and CLEO. Additionally, the partnership opens commercial avenues for Gold-i to offer its technology to Derive’s native user base of corporate treasuries and foundations.

By routing through MatrixNET’s ultra-low latency infrastructure, institutional users can access deep liquidity and customisable execution models. The platform provides advanced routing and aggregation features designed to help clients secure better pricing, attract more customers, and mitigate toxic trading.

Bloomberg Launches Options IOI to Streamline Equity Derivatives Liquidity Monitoring

Bloomberg has launched Options IOI, a price monitoring tool engineered to help equity derivatives investors manage pricing information overload and streamline liquidity screening. The solution utilises Bloomberg’s natural language processing (NLP), which is specifically calibrated for the derivatives markets, to automatically detect indications of interest (IOIs) within a user’s Instant Bloomberg (IB) chat rooms and organise them into a centralised dashboard.

The launch addresses growing fragmentation in the rapidly expanding equity derivatives market, where institutional participation and off-exchange block trading have limited market transparency. Traditionally, traders, sell-side banks, and interdealer brokers have had to manually comb through unstructured messages across multiple desktop applications and communication channels to discover liquidity—a time-consuming process that can compromise pricing efficiency.

By centralising options pricing from across multiple chats, the new tool allows users to filter thousands of IB messages by instrument characteristics, price levels, and counterparties in seconds. Traders can compare broker-distributed pricing alongside real-time exchange data directly on the Bloomberg Terminal, and jump instantly back into the relevant IB conversation to negotiate and finalise trades.

SmartStream Launches Smart Agents AI Solution for Banking Operations

SmartStream has announced the launch of Smart Agents, an agentic artificial intelligence (AI) solution purpose-built for financial institutions and regulated environments. Natively integrated with Smart Reconciliations, the system is designed to streamline bank operations and can be deployed immediately without requiring modifications to a client’s existing infrastructure. The technology has already been validated through successful pilot deployments with Tier 1 financial institutions.

The solution addresses a major industry inefficiency, as financial firms currently dedicate up to 70% of their operational effort to handling exception workflows across disconnected systems. Smart Agents automates these fragmented processes end-to-end, including managing internal and counterparty communications. By surfacing only the specific workflow steps that require human intervention, the system shifts the paradigm so that data is automatically brought to analysts rather than requiring manual investigation.

To ensure compliance with strict internal governance, Smart Agents features complete data privacy and provides step-by-step explainability for every action taken. It offers institutions operational flexibility by running in both assistive and autonomous modes, allowing firms to safely scale their AI adoption according to their specific workflow requirements.

EquiLend and Delta Capita Partner on Spire Implementation

EquiLend has entered a strategic partnership with Delta Capita to expand implementation support for EquiLend Spire, its securities finance platform.

The arrangement gives EquiLend additional delivery capacity as adoption of Spire grows across the securities finance market. Delta Capita will act as an implementation partner for new client onboarding and platform upgrades, working within EquiLend’s existing scoping, delivery and governance model.

The partnership combines EquiLend’s product and platform expertise with Delta Capita’s experience in securities finance, systems implementation and change management. The firms said Spire engagements will be delivered through a single, jointly governed model intended to give clients a clearer engagement structure and faster onboarding from the start of a project.

For Delta Capita, the role is centred on implementation discipline and securities finance delivery support. Sarah Carver, Global Head of Consulting at Delta Capita, said the firm would bring “the analysis discipline, delivery rigor, and securities finance domain knowledge to drive successful Spire projects.”

EquiLend framed the partnership as part of its work to support client experience as the platform evolves. Laurence Marshall, Managing Director of EquiLend, said Spire is “critical infrastructure for securities lending operations” and that the partnership expands “the implementation resources available to Spire clients,” supporting “smooth onboarding and upgrades” while helping clients keep their Spire environments current.