This Week: Finbourne, Eventus, Esprow & more

Finbourne extends Series A round with £30 million debt facility from Kreos Capital

Finbourne has secured a £30 million (~$37 million) debt facility from Kreos Capital. The funding forms an extension to Finbourne’s Series A round, which was completed in April 2021.

The fintech, which provides SaaS-delivered data management solutions to simplify infrastructure concerns for financial institutions, says that it will use the funds to branch out beyond its investment management origins into banking and capital markets. Finbourne recently launched operations in the North America and Apac regions, opening offices in New York and Singapore.

Esprow launches new product for API management

Testing and compliance solutions provider Esprow has released a new product called ETP S-Box. The tool is designed to help organizations manage their Fix APIs. ETP S-Box acts as a central repository for creating, browsing, and sharing specifications for both Fix and non-Fix protocols. It allows users to manage various message specifications, including Fix message specifications for multiple trading venues, binary protocol specifications for exchanges, and Fix API specifications for individual clients.

The product also allows financial institutions to export API specifications to machine-readable XML formats. It can be integrated within Fix trading gateways and with continuous integration/continuous deployment pipelines.

Eventus introduces new anti-money laundering utility

Eventus, a provider of trade surveillance and market risk solutions, has unveiled a new anti-money laundering (AML) platform aimed at helping firms combat financial crime. The new cloud-based product, called Validus AML (VAML), uses behavioral analytics to help financial institutions detect and flag potential financial crimes.

Eventus already has a presence in transaction monitoring and trade surveillance, but the new product will add sanctions monitoring and behavioral analytics capabilities. Rather than generating an alert for each suspicious, event, VAML aggregates multiple events into a single scenario model with the aim of reducing false positives.

Poll: Fines for off-channel trading communications to hit UK firms next

Fifty percent of industry professionals believe the UK will be hit with greater regulatory scrutiny and fines for off-channel trading communications, according to a poll conducted by technology services company Global Relay. A further 31% of respondents anticipate action from the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the report states.

In late 2022, the SEC issued fines amounting to more than $1.1 billion to Wall Street firms for “pervasive off-channel communications”, leading to fears that the regulatory scrutiny on electronic communications would spread to other markets. Ongoing regulatory cooperation between the FCA and SEC appears to reinforce this proposition.