This Week: FactSet/Truvalue Labs, Euronext, Finastra/CloudMargin, DTCC, and More

FactSet Acquires Truvalue Labs

Data giant FactSet has entered into a definitive agreement to purchase Truevalue Labs, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data. The transaction is expected to close later this year.

Truvalue Labs joined the Open:FactSet Marketplace in 2018, and its data is already successfully integrated for use with current FactSet content and products, including the FactSet Workstation.

Founded in 2013 and headquartered in San Francisco, Truvalue Labs applies AI-driven technology to over 100,000 unstructured text sources in 13 languages, including news, trade journals, nongovernmental organizations and industry reports, to provide daily signals that identify positive and negative ESG behavior. Its coverage spans over 19,000 public and private companies and generates short-term, long-term, and momentum scores derived from hundreds of signals.

Curv Gets Investments From Illuminate Financial and Franklin Templeton

Illuminate Financial, a fintech venture capital firm, and asset manager Franklin Templeton announced contributions to a Series A funding round for Curv, a cloud-based digital asset security infrastructure.

Curv serves institutional and crypto-native crowds through its multi-party computation (MPC) security technology, which allows for the safe transfer, storage and management of any digital asset on any blockchain or distributed-ledger technology. The company claims its solution is used by dozens of institutions across the globe, including Franklin Templeton, which plans to leverage Curv to expand into the digital asset market.

Illuminate and Franklin Templeton are participating in the round, which began in July, alongside existing investors CommerzVentures, Coinbase, Digital Currency Group, Team8 and Digital Garage.

Hedge Fund Selects Tier1 CRM Platform

Kadima Sun Investments, a hedge fund based in New York, has gone live with Tier1 Financial Solutions’ cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) platform. The deployment enables the fund to more efficiently pitch the firm’s investment strategy to potential investors and uncover new business opportunities.

Through the technology, Kadima Sun is able to increase investor outreach, share information, and track interactions with key prospects while minimizing misplacement of information. It includes a mobile offering that has been instrumental to the fund during the remote-work environment that has emerged during the Covid-19 pandemic, according to the announcement.

Tier1 recently launched a new pre-packaged delivery model for its global CRM software solution that addresses broader market demand and improves time-to-value for clients of all sizes.

Euronext Suffers Outages That Permitted Trading After Close

European exchange operator Euronext suffered two glitches on Oct. 19, causing a three-hour outage and causing shares to continue trading after the market close, according to a report by the Financial Times.

The exchange suspended trading across all its venues and asset classes shortly before 10 am in Paris and did not restart until 12:45 pm, in an outage that affected Paris, Amsterdam, Lisbon, and other trading centers just as some of the region’s best-known companies were releasing their earnings reports. Later that day, Euronext’s closing auction failed to take place, prompting the exchange to cancel all trades that occurred after 17:30 CET (11:30 am ET) in all asset classes except commodities.

The group said it was investigating the incident.

Thoma Bravo to Acquire AxiomSL

Thoma Bravo, a private equity investment firm focused on software and technology services, has agreed to acquire a controlling interest in AxiomSL, a provider of cloud-enabled risk management and regulatory solutions. The transaction is expected to close by the end of the year. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Upon closing, Thoma Bravo plans to use its expertise in enterprise software, operational capabilities and prior experience in complex financial technology markets to partner with AxiomSL’s management team to grow AxiomSL’s customer base and drive further innovation for critical risk management and regulatory solutions.

The AxiomSL platform offers a data management and analytics platform, ControllerView, which includes more than 5,000 risk and regulatory reports across 55 jurisdictions and 110 regulators. The company serves clients such as banks, investment managers, broker-dealers, and commodity trading institutions.

Finastra and CloudMargin Pair Up for SaaS-based Collateral Management

Finastra and CloudMargin, which provides a cloud-native collateral and margin management solution, have joined forces to deliver an integrated collateral and margin management solution to market participants of all sizes via a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model.

Collateral Management as a Service, powered by CloudMargin and available through Finastra’s FusionFabric.cloud platform, connects to Finastra’s core treasury and capital markets solutions, facilitating end-to-end straight-through processing of derivatives transactions, and all associated collateral management workflows, from trade booking through to settlement.

Because the new offering is delivered through a SaaS model, clients can onboard rapidly via the FusionFabric.cloud platform and benefit from access to secure collateral management workflow software that is fully integrated with other Finastra treasury and capital markets solutions. There’s no hardware to buy, install or support, minimizing the total cost of ownership for the customer.

Linedata Unveils New Asset Management Platform

Linedata, a provider of credit and asset management technology, data and services, has unveiled its latest service, Linedata Asset Management Platform (AMP).

AMP offers core components such as a cloud-based system, continuous delivery and continuous integration, an AI-powered data analytics service, and a data management service.

DTCC Launches Enhanced Access to Money Market Data

The Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. (DTCC) announced that its DTCC Money Market Kinetics service has been enhanced to deliver more frequent updates to critical data, helping provide increased transparency into the volatility that has been impacting money markets since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Data previously delivered once a day will now be delivered every 30 minutes. Users will also receive additional data fields such as country code, sector, and duration from issuance to support advanced market and issuer analytics. Additionally, users will now get access to an end-of-day file, containing all transactions for that day.

DTCC Money Market Kinetics provides daily and intraday feeds of anonymized commercial paper (CP) and institutional certificates of deposit (CDs) secondary settlement transactions data to enhance the analysis of this market leveraging data from DTCC’s settlement subsidiary, the Depository Trust Company (DTC).

TORA OEMS Deepens Fixed-Income Offering with MTS BondsPro Integration

Buy-side technology provider TORA has integrated its order execution management system (OEMS) with MTS BondsPro, MTS Markets International’s alternative trading system. The new connectivity allows market participants to electronically trade bonds from the TORA OEMS in the MTS BondsPro platform.

MTS BondsPro, part of London Stock Exchange Group, is an electronic bond trading platform that offers access to liquidity on its anonymous all-to-all order book. MTS BondsPro supports markets in more than 20,000 corporate and emerging market bonds and provides access to more than 100 liquidity providers with more than 600 buy-side and sell-side firms engaging with the MTS BondsPro order book.

TORA clients are able to see the depth of the market for each bond within the TORA interface, execute orders, and monitor execution progression from the system. The integration with MTS BondsPro is meant to help asset managers and traders experience optimal STP.

Avelacom Launches New Connectivity Options Between Asia and North America

Avelacom, a US-based connectivity and IT infrastructure provider, is launching a new Chicago-to-Tokyo back-up route, supporting efforts to ensure robust trading systems among banks, exchanges and trading firms as they prepare for volatility due to the upcoming US election.

The new back-up route is geographically diverse from the Pacific Crossing 1 (PC-1) submarine cable system used for most primary routes and has only a 5-millisecond difference in latency compared to the primary connection. This back-up route is therefore the fastest non-PC-1 route and could support clients experiencing problems with their primary route.

Connectivity between US and Asian exchanges is a particular focus as it is expected that these are where bouts of volatility will be seen. Reflecting this, the route will be also used to connect to other major Asian financial hubs, including Hong Kong, Shanghai, Singapore, Taipei, and Thailand.