This Week: Bloomberg, Interactive Brokers, Virtu, Northern Trust, SimCorp & More

Interactive Brokers Receives Big Fine from CFTC

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission hit Interactive Brokers LLC with a civil monetary penalty of $11.5 million and required the futures commission merchant to disgorge $706,214 earned in part from its role as the FCM carrying the accounts of Haena Park and her companies, which were the subject of a 2018 CFTC enforcement action. The CFTC said that Interactive Brokers executives failed to “diligently supervise its officers’, employees’, and agents’ handling of several commodity trading accounts and failing to adequately implement procedures to detect and report suspicious transactions as required under federal anti-money laundering (AML) laws and regulations.”

Virtu Suffers Hack

As was reported by the Wall Street Journal, Virtu Financial Inc. “lost $6.9 million to hackers who seized control of the email account of one of its executives and used fake emails to send two fraudulent wire transfers to bank accounts in China.” According to the article, the hack did not compromise any client information or disrupt the firm’s trading systems.

Bloomberg Launches Proprietary ESG Scores

Bloomberg officially launched new environmental and social scores for 252 companies in the oil & gas sector and scores covering governance and board composition for more than 4,300 companies across multiple industries. The oil & gas ratings will be derived from company disclosure data, taking into account factors such as climate change, and health and safety issues. The board composition scores are comprised of a quantitative model that factors in diversity, tenure, overboarding (or directors who sit on numerous boards), and independence.

Subscribers to the Bloomberg Terminal can view the scores at {BI ESG <GO>} by selecting ESG Scores from the Data Library.

SimCorp Continues with Azure Cloud Migration

SimCorp is progressing with its migration to the Microsoft Azure cloud. The vendor started with an internal migration of IT operations and Services to Azure in 2019, and now SimCorp is moving its external solutions and services to the cloud. Users of SimCorp Dimension as a Service have the option of using a private cloud with current hosting partners or the public cloud with Azure.

TradingScreen, Imagine Extend Partnership

TradingScreen and Imagine Software are expanding on the work they’ve done together. Through it, hedge funds and asset managers can tap into both TradingScreen’s order and execution management system (OEMS) and Imagine’s cross-asset position management, risk analytics, and regulatory compliance platform. As part of the extension, the start-up hedge fund community can now access a packaged solution at a lower cost of entry that is fully integrated and scalable.

“Increasingly complex regulatory requirements creates the need for seamless integration from the front-end trading desk, right the way through to middle and back office risk management operations,” said Jim Li, CIO of Asia Lion Capital, in the release. “Thanks to TradingScreen and Imagine, we can now benefit from fully integrated trading, risk and compliance functionality.”

Northern Trust to Provide Asset Servicing Tools for BondEvalue’s DLT Platform.

Northern Trust and BondEvalue announced a strategic partnership to deliver integrated asset servicing and digital solutions for fractional ownership of fixed-income bonds. BondEvalue’s platform will facilitate trading of fractionalized investable assets based on wholesale bonds, while Northern Trust will be its exclusive asset servicing provider.

This partnership follows the recent news that the BondEvalue platform had been granted permission to enter the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s Sandbox Express to launch its blockchain-based bond exchange.

Vela, IPC Expand Market Data Partnership

Vela’s SuperFeed normalized market data is now available via IPC’s Connexus Cloud and Connexus Labs. The partnership will provide IPC customers with access to SuperFeed, via the Connexus Cloud. It will also enable IPC customers, utilizing Connexus Labs, to access an on-demand market data solution to support trading application testing along with third-party product evaluations.

Clearwater Launches AI Powered Data Extraction

Clearwater Analytics has announced the launch of its machine learning-based information extraction service. The offering uses advanced AI techniques like natural language processing (NLP) and deep learning to identify key data elements in a variety of document types, and then extracts this data and feeds it into Clearwater’s data aggregation engine to be reconciled by its Software-as-a-Service solution.