This Week: ICE Bonds and MarketAxess plan to connect liquidity networks, TS Imagine, Bloomberg, and more

ICE Bonds and MarketAxess plan to connect liquidity networks

ICE Bonds, the bond trading and data arm of Intercontinental Exchange, and fixed-income electronic trading platform operator MarketAxess have announced plans to connect their respective liquidity networks to provide institutional clients and wealth managers with greater efficiency and access to deeper liquidity in fixed income markets.

Establishing connectivity to their respective protocols and liquidity pools will enable ICE Bonds’ automated trading system (ATS), ICE TMC, and MarketAxess’ Open Trading network to communicate with each other, expanding the depth and reach for their respective global user bases.

“We have what we think is one of the deepest pools of liquidity in the Muni market and to take that and partner with ICE TMC, we think is going to be really beneficial to the markets,” says Daniel Kelly, head of municipal securities at MarketAxess. “Not only to people seeking out liquidity but also for liquidity providers because we’re trying to create a one-stop shop for the electronic trading of Munis.” 

Compared to other securities, municipal bonds have been behind the curve in the modernization and electronification of fixed income markets, says Kelly, who spent almost 30 years in fixed-income roles at sell-side firms—22 of those years specializing in muni bonds at Morgan Stanley—before joining MarketAxess last year.

By leveraging ICE Bonds’ established retail brokerage and wealth management presence alongside MarketAxess’ leadership in institutional trading, the interaction between liquidity pools aims to enhance price transparency, best execution, and overall market liquidity for all participants.

Kelly says clients were requesting a more integrated liquidity pool. “The initial stage and initial step of this partnership in Munis is that ICE TMC clients will have the ability to respond to MarketAxess RFQs on the MarketAxess platform,” he says.

With the electronification of fixed income markets, particularly bonds, a hot topic across capital markets, Kelly says the partnership that the two are creating has the potential to supercharge both client and dealer adoption and drive increased recognition that “you can do more with electronic platforms.”

TS Imagine enhances sell-side financial risk management solution

TS Imagine, a cross-asset provider of trading, portfolio, and risk management solutions for financial institutions, has announced the availability of RiskSmart X’s CCP Margin Calculator.

RiskSmart X, which launched last year, enables users to assess how much margin they would require from their buy-side clients. With this update, the CCP Margin Calculator allows users to also assess how much margin will be required from their exchange counterparts.

Currently, RiskSmart X’s coverage includes 33 clearinghouses, over 50 global exchanges, and 13 methodologies. Calculations are updated throughout each trading day, and TS Imagine will continue to expand its coverage based on client needs and developments within global financial markets.

BayernInvest streamlines workflows with Bloomberg buy-side suite

BayernInvest, a German asset manager with approximately €88 billion in assets under control, has adopted an integrated suite of Bloomberg solutions to support its front-to-back investment workflows. Bloomberg’s tech-stack will help to optimize the efficiency of technical processes and allow BayernInvest to scale its products offerings with minimal cost impact.

Bloomberg solutions were already key components within the BayernInvest workflow, with the firm’s portfolio managers utilizing Bloomberg’s PORT Enterprise and EMSX solutions as well as pricing data and the Bloomberg global aggregate bond indices. With the implementation of this expanded set of Bloomberg solutions, BayernInvest now benefits from a fully integrated order management system offering across all major asset classes and through engaging Bloomberg AIM’s Portfolio Manager Workspace (PM <GO>), can make faster investment decisions and apply changes to its portfolios at scale.

PORT Enterprise will give the firm access to industry-leading risk and attribution models and detailed portfolio analysis, optimizing the management of data more seamlessly across its asset management and fund administration services. With MARS Collateral Management, BayernInvest will also have increased connectivity across their workflows, with fewer manual processes.

Eventus offers trade surveillance solution to Brazil’s ANCORD

Eventus, a provider of trade surveillance and financial risk solutions, has partnered with ANCORD, Brazil’s National Association of Securities, Foreign Exchange and Commodities Brokers and Dealers, to make Eventus’ Validus platform available to ANCORD members.

ANCORD members will now be able to quickly implement Validus as their trade surveillance solution and benefit from the ability to adapt Validus to their needs, with ready-to-use solutions as well as extensive automation and functionality for more complex use cases - all at a price that is exclusive to them.

The move follows actions taken earlier this year by BSM, the self-regulatory arm of the Brazilian stock exchange B3, to impose strict market operations monitoring guidelines, requiring all brokerages in Brazil to implement and manage their own trade surveillance system. The BSM has required firms to independently monitor their own trading activity to detect regulatory infractions such as insider trading, wash trades, layering, spoofing, front running and more.

Iress partners with Ediphy for global fixed income trading solution

Software provider Iress and fixed income technology vendor Ediphy have partnered to provide trading customers with a comprehensive fixed income solution to Iress’ global network. Through the partnership, Iress trading customers will have access to a low-cost mechanism to trade fixed income markets, and to liquidity from fixed income providers and venues covering the USA, Europe and APAC.

Ediphy provides fixed income execution and workflow automation, large-scale data management and analytics, covering government, sovereign, supranational, and agency bonds (SSAs), credit bonds and cleared interest rate swaps (IRS), with aggregated liquidity in excess of 250,000 International Securities Identification Numbers (ISINs).

Hazelcast adds vector search, unveils core architecture for AI integration

Software provider Hazelcast has announced the introduction of vector search in the latest release of its flagship product, Hazelcast Platform. The platform delivers a core architecture that combines distributed compute, in-memory data storage, intelligent integration, and vector search, all of which are key requirements for enterprise AI and critical applications.

The introduction of vector search in Hazelcast Platform enables enterprises to deploy a high-performance end-to-end pipeline to query structured and unstructured data. It aims to offer the flexibility to generate vector data structures and embeddings—where words, images and other objects are converted into numbers, retaining their meanings and relationships—from text plot summaries, delivering new efficiencies for data scientists to provide data insights.

While applicable to all industries, vector search can immediately benefit transaction authorization applications. In financial use cases such as know-your-customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML), vector search can augment and expedite the verification process with semantic search across text, imagery, and other sources to improve the accuracy and speed of determining whether a transaction is legitimate or fraudulent.

Tesselate, AccessFintech partner on loan market operations

Paris-based Tesselate Group, a financial services consultancy specializing in corporate banking, operations, and managed services will integrate its hive.t platform with the Synergy loan data management service of AccessFintech, a provider of real-time data insights and collaboration across financial markets.

Under the partnership AccessFintech’s Synergy platform will integrate with Tesselate’s consultancy services, leading to improved efficiency, reduced manual errors, and increased productivity for financial institutions.

AccessFintech’s loan data management solution supports the syndicated loan market by delivering data transparency, preventing common issues, and significantly reducing email communication. Synergy’s collaborative network leverages shared data and integrates hive.t’s connectivity with data systems for agents, lenders, trustees, and administrators, which officials say will enhance real-time data transparency and support the digitalization of loan contract data.

OptionMetrics releases signed volume intraday dataset

OptionMetrics, an options, equities, ETFs, and futures analytics provider for institutional investors and academic researchers worldwide, released its new IvyDB Signed Volume intraday dataset, now available in five-minute and 30-minute snapshot intervals throughout the day, in addition to an end of day file. The new dataset gives quants, hedge fund managers, and other institutional investors even more timely insights on retail trading, zero days to expiration (0DTE) options, meme stocks, hedging flows, and other market-making activities.

The new Signed Volume release also delivers more accurate data and a compressed file size, simplifying data delivery and enabling charts to be run even faster. End-of-day data will now be updated six hours earlier each day, at 4:45 p.m. versus 11 p.m previously.

OptionMetrics IvyDB Signed Volume offers a full history on buy/sell pressure, starting from January 2016, on more than 4,000 unique stocks and indices. It tracks daily US options trading volume, indicating whether trades occurred at bid, ask, or midpoint, and can be used as an add-on to OptionMetrics’ flagship IvyDB US or as a standalone product.