LSEG acquires Quantile  
 
The London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) has agreed to acquire Quantile Group and pay a maximum aggregate consideration of up to £274 million ($354 million) to Quantile’s shareholders. The acquisition will allow LSEG to expand its post-trade risk management solutions. 
 
Founded in 2015, Quantile provides portfolio, margin, and capital optimization and compression services for the financial services market. Quantile’s optimization engine provides advanced trade compression and risk rebalancing services to banks, hedge funds, and other financial institutions trading over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives. 
 
Quantile will complement LSEG’s global OTC derivatives clearing services, which provide risk management and capital efficiencies to customers. 
  
Quantile will remain a standalone entity within LSEG’s post-trade division and will report to Daniel Maguire, head of post-trade at LSEG.  
 
LSEG will fund the acquisition from existing cash resources and credit facilities. The acquisition is expected to be complete in 2022, subject to antitrust and other regulatory approvals. 

Morningstar adds analytics from Sentifi  

Morningstar will include Sentifi’s alternative data analytics in its data products. In the first quarter of 2022, Morningstar will integrate Sentifi’s sentiment and attention analytics into its data products as an additional toolset for redistributors, advisors, and asset managers. 
 
Sentifi sources data from over 500 million tweets, blogs, forums, and news articles every day and can help identify early murmurs of momentum shifts for over 59,000 stocks, currencies, commodities, and indices.
 
It also monitors allocation decisions across 150,000 active and passive funds. These datasets help investors track unexpected market momentum shifts in real-time as they impact portfolios. 

Synechron and LeapYear Technologies partner for differential privacy solutions
 
Synechron has partnered with LeapYear Technologies to accelerate the use of differential privacy solutions for banks, asset management firms, insurance companies, and stock exchanges.
 
LeapYear is a software provider that enables the sharing of confidential trade and position data with privacy. Synechron and LeapYear have been working together since last year to elevate LeapYear’s solutions and validate the outcomes through the co-development of a proof-of-concept assessing differential privacy for credit risk models.  
Synechron is preparing its technical teams and FinLabs experts on the use and development of LeapYear’s solutions and will make this available to its clients across North America, Europe, and Asia. 
 
Ice to offer reference data for leveraged loan market  
 
Intercontinental Exchange (Ice) will begin offering leveraged bank loan reference data through its ongoing collaboration with US Bank. The offering expects to provide investors and other market participants with detailed reference data from the largest administrator of loans in the US. 
 
Underlying data for syndicated loans have not generally been readily available to market participants, making it a challenge to classify or compare different instruments at the corporate level. 
 
Ice’s solution offers over 130 different reference data fields, including terms and conditions, corporate actions, and business entity structures. It is designed to make it easy for users to characterize and compare different loans. 
 
The service is built into Ice’s reference data platform, which allows for linkage to larger corporate structures and other securities. It is also introducing a specific and unique identifier for leveraged loans to help investors easily identify loans. 
 
SimCorp and FundApps partner for shareholding disclosure
 
SimCorp, a software-as-a-service investment management provider, has collaborated with FundApps, a regtech service provider, to help firms with shareholding disclosure requirements. 
 
SimCorp will integrate FundApps within SimCorp Dimension, its front-to-back investment management platform, to provide clients with post-trade share ownership reporting capabilities in over 100 jurisdictions from Dimension’s investment book of record. 
 
Clients can use FundApps’ regulatory monitoring and reporting platform to automate their global disclosure obligations for major shareholding, short selling, takeover panels, and sensitive industries. The service applies relevant legislation to ensure SimCorp clients report correctly and on time to avoid the risk of fines. 
 
The collaboration is part of SimCorp’s Open Innovation program, created to connect clients with innovation from an ecosystem of startups, fintechs, and cloud and data providers. 

Bloomberg and Acadia introduces pre-trade Simm calculations

Bloomberg and Acadia, a provider of integrated risk management services for the derivatives community, have partnered to provide clients with Standard Initial Margin Model (Simm) pre-trade analytics. 

Bloomberg has integrated its Multi-Asset Risk Solutions (Mars) Simm with Acadia’s Initial Margin Exposure Manager (Imem) model for Simm. The new calculations allow clients to run pre-trade Simm analytics through Bloomberg’s Mars using Acadia’s Imem common risk interface format (CRIF) data capabilities. 

Mars Simm is an optimization tool that allows traders to improve their front office decision-making considering the current Uncleared Margin Rule framework. Firms can import their CRIF files via Acadia to Mars to determine their margin exposure and adjust their portfolios’ allocations to minimize custodial costs incurred by exposures of over $50 million. 

As part of the initial margin rule framework created by the Basel Committee and the International organization of Securities Commissions (Iosco), firms that surpass an exposure threshold of $50 million will need to calculate an initial margin using Isda’s Simm. This can result in added costs and residual stipulations for impacted firms. 

The addition of pre-trade Simm analytics expands Bloomberg’s existing post-trade integration with Acadia. Since 2018, the service has enabled market participants in-scope to calculate initial margin for uncleared derivatives access risk sensitivities calculation services through Bloomberg and Acadia.

Identitii joins Nice Actimize X-Sight Marketplace

Financial crime compliance provider Identitii has joined the Nice Actimize X-Sight Marketplace, a platform that matches technology providers with financial institutions looking for financial crime solutions. 
  
Identitii’s Austrac (Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre) reporting platform will be offered through the X-Sight Marketplace. It can also be integrated into the Nice Actimize financial crime solutions suite.
 
Identitii’s software-as-a-service regulatory reporting platform helps financial institutions automate anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing reporting to reduce the risk of non-compliance with financial crime regulations. 
 
While initially available for Austrac reporting in Australia, the platform can adapt for regulatory requirements in other countries, with New Zealand and Canada to be added soon. 

Confluence collaborates with S&P Global Trucost 
 
Confluence Technologies has collaborated with Trucost, a carbon and environmental data and risk analysis provider. 
 
The collaboration combines Confluence’s cloud-based Revolution platform, which provides analysis of portfolio performance, attribution, risk, and compliance, with Trucost’s data to provide an integrated ESG analytics and regulatory reporting solution. 
 
Trucost, part of S&P Global, has been assessing risks relating to climate change, natural resource constraints, and broader ESG factors since 2000. The combined offering will help clients understand their ESG exposure to common factors.