This Week: BNY Mellon; Amazon/Digital Asset; TP ICAP; Hazeltree; SimCorp & More

Liontrust Selects BNY Mellon for Outsourced Fund Services

Liontrust Asset Management has selected BNY Mellon to consolidate its outsourced fund services across its UK and Ireland offices. The asset manager completed its acquisition of Alliance Trust Investments for £21.11 million in January 2018, resulting in five different asset serving relationships across the Liontrust business—and thus underwent a selection exercise to choose a single service provider.

The services will include depository, fund accounting, global custody, global risk solutions, middle office, and transfer agency. Additional ancillary services will extend to securities lending, FX and cash management.

Liontrust has £11.3 billion ($14.6 billion)  in assets under management and is continuing to build out its product offerings and market share internationally.

Digital Asset’s DAML Launches on Amazon Quantum Ledger Database

Digital Asset’s DAML, an open source smart contract language, is now available on Amazon’s Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB), which is supported by the Blockchain Technology Partners’ Sextant for DAML management platform.

Amazon QLDB is a ledger database that provides a transparent, immutable and cryptographically-verifiable transaction log on Amazon Web Services.

The new integration offers clients access to a decentralized ledger that leverages DAML and is designed to be used for multi-party use.

ICAP Announces European Equities Desk

TP ICAP has launched a European equities special situations desk that will work alongside its US equivalent, a team headed up by Humeyra Nicolas since 2008.

The desk will identify and support trading activity in stocks involved in special situations including M&A and rights issues. EU clients will have access to a proprietary pairs trading engine, liquidity across global markets and commentary from specialists.

It’s objective is to have a strong global team based in London, New York, and Hong Kong to ensure comprehensive coverage across all trading zones.

The interdealer broker has made a number of hires to build out the team including Corey Davide, who was hired from Bloomberg Tradebook and is now appointed head of electronic trading at ICAP.

The European team will be led by Meb Namajee, who previously worked at Citadel, Lehman Brothers and Kepler Cheureux.

Artemis IM Completes Hazeltree Integration for Collateral and Securities Finance Management

Artemis investment management, a UK-based fund manager with approximately £27.5 billion ($35.4 billion) in AUM, has announced it is leveraging Hazeltree’s solutions to manage its collateral and securities finance operations.

Hazeltree’s Collateral Manager solution aggregates over-the-counter collateral management activities, in-line with ISDA agreements.

The provider’s securities finance technology is designed to offer full visibility of the global securities lending market to benchmark performance, efficiently execute transactions and help clients optimize returns in one centralized solution.

EquiLend Goes Live with Collateral Trading Service

EquiLend has rolled out its collateral trading service in the Americas and Europe, with clients in Asia set to join in April.

The service offers funding and financing desks, where clients can execute and manage trade structures with their counterparts. It supports collateral trade negotiation, execution, and management of lifecycle events, such as substitutions and transaction rolls.

The initial roll-out supports collateral upgrade and downgrade trades.

EquiLend is planning further enhancements to the platform in the future—including additional collateral trade types, straight-through-processing, and connectivity to EquiLend Spire’s books, records, and inventory management modules.

SimCorp and Alkymi Partner for AI Initiative

SimCorp and Alkymi, a start-up that specializes in data management products, have announced a partnership to develop solutions using machine learning technology.  

Alkymi’s Data Inbox is a machine learning-based platform that extracts data across enterprise workflows to help firms derive insights.

Data Inbox will be incorporated into SimCorp Dimension and looks to address limitations across the different asset classes—such as the challenges involved in automating insights from alternative investments or unstructured data sets.

As part of the partnership, SimCorp has also taken an investment stake in Alkymi, with the intention of delivering future data management solutions using ML technology.