This Week: Nasdaq/Equinix, Northern Trust, Goldman/Bloomberg and more

Nasdaq signs multi-year deal with Equinix

Nasdaq has announced a multi-year partnership with Equinix, a provider of connectivity services and data centers, to support and build out the exchange group’s cloud infrastructure.

As part of the deal, Equinix has agreed to deliver ultra-low latency edge compute capabilities directly from Nasdaq’s primary data center in Carteret, New Jersey.

For over 13 years, Nasdaq has leveraged Platform Equinix to support its network of customers and third-party vendors across the world. The technology is designed to enable low latency access for workflows that support the full trade lifecycle, including price discovery and analytics, in addition to other pre-and post-trade tools.

The agreement aims to further enable the US markets operator to address current and future infrastructure requirements while accelerating its cloud transformation at global scale.

Northern Trust launches climate reporting analytics

Northern Trust’s Investment Risk and Analytical Services arm has built out its ESG analytics to include new climate risk reporting for its global institutional investor clients.

The Climate Focus Report is part of Northern Trust’s ESG Insights suite of reporting solutions that offer clients a range of carbon metrics, physical risk, and transition risk data at the portfolio level. This includes detailed emissions information, carbon intensity measures, and forward-looking scenario pathway analysis.

The analytics are aimed at helping institutional investors, such as pension funds, access key climate change risk factors against investments in their portfolios and compare them against representative benchmarks for absolute and relative analysis over time.

The new services are also designed to support internal oversight and external disclosure obligations through their alignment with the Financial Stability Board’s Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures reporting recommendations.

Bloomberg and Goldman Sachs launch China USD credit liquid high-yield indices

Bloomberg, the data giant, and Goldman Sachs have rolled out a new China USD Credit Liquid HY Index to provide market participants with liquid and replicable indices to adjust their exposures.

The five custom indices can be accessed via the Bloomberg Terminal. The Index family incorporates a liquidity requirement used by Goldman Sachs its existing index constituents.

The underlying index can be accessed on the Bloomberg Terminal by searching the ticker I29381US Index <GO>.

Plato Partnership and Ficc board team up for research

Plato Partnership and the Fixed Income, Currencies, and Commodities (Ficc) Markets Standards Board (FMSB) have agreed to collaborate on a Ficc academic research leveraging Plato’s Market Structure Academic Research program (MI3).

One of the objectives of the Plato academic division is to produce independent research and analytics to facilitate peer review and industry-wide initiatives. The work aims to stimulate debate around the future of market structure design and allow regulators and market practitioners to make better-informed decisions.  

To date, MI3 has commissioned several important academic reports focused on key equities market structure topics.

The strategic agreement with FMSB will allow MI3 to broaden its academic work beyond equities to cover multi-asset class research.

Ice integrates Rimes ETF data

The Intercontinental Exchange has announced that it is integrating exchange-traded funds (ETF) data. managed by Rimes, a provider of benchmark data and data management solutions, into several of its products, including Ice ETF Hub, Ice Portfolio Analytics, and Ice FI Select.

The objective of the partnership is to provide clients who create or use ETF products with deeper insights, analytics, and data to make better-informed decisions.

Users of the Ice ETF Hub should be able to use the Rimes ETF service to access issuer data across equity and fixed income securities, while Ice Portfolio Analytics and ICE FI Select clients will have critical constituent and fund-level data when evaluating, trading, and executing fixed income securities.

The addition of Rimes’ ETF data service to Ice’s platforms is aimed at offering customers a centralized place for information and helping to reduce the manual work involved in analyzing fund and constituent-specific information.

Clearstream processes first digital issuances on D7

Clearstream, a subsidiary of Deutsche Börse, has launched a central register for electronic securities in Germany, supporting the first dematerialized issuances conducted by Deka Bank and MünchenerHyp, in cooperation with DZ Bank.

The announcement introduces the first live component of Deutsche Börse’s D7 platform, a post-trade solution based on a hybrid distributed ledger technology model, that will enable market participants to digitize their financial products.

Clients will have access to both the existing central and distributed infrastructures. Via a public node operated by Clearstream, issuance conditions will be made available to the public. Issuers and other stakeholders will be able to view updates to the central register and details of the entries, such as the legal and processing status, as well as fixed nominals and redemptions.

The register connects to the European post-trade infrastructure T2S and is designed to simplify data flow for many upstream and downstream processes such as listing, trading, and settlement.