This Week: Northern Trust/BackRock, Nasdaq, IHS Markit/OpenGamma, MEMX, and More

Northern Trust Partners with BlackRock to Offer Front-to-Back Office Integrated Solutions

Northern Trust and BlackRock have partnered to provide integrated products, services, and technologies that cover front-to-back office operations to investment firms.

The new services look to enable interoperability and transparency across the combined offerings, delivering operations, data and servicing capabilities to mutual clients. The joint offering will be available through Aladdin, BlackRock’s investment management platform.

The alliance is an extension of Northern Trust Whole Office, a strategy that looks to integrate Northern Trust’s asset servicing platform with partnering firms to enable clients to access new technologies, services, and solutions.

Nasdaq Ventures Invests in Caspian

Nasdaq’s investment arm, Nasdaq Ventures, has taken a minority stake in Caspian, a UK-based firm that specializes in financial crime investigation technologies. The move is part of Nasdaq’s strategy to support and grow its footprint in financial crime services.

The funding will be used to invest in Caspian’s automated anti-money laundering (AML) investigations platform, AML Investigator, and help to accelerate the product’s expansion.

The two firms will also combine research and development efforts to advance developments in new technologies for combatting financial crime.

IHS Markit Partners with OpenGamma for Joint UMR Offering

IHS Markit and OpenGamma have teamed up to provide joint technologies and services for margin management to mutual clients. The collaboration will combine IHS Markit’s post-trade derivatives calculation service and OpenGamma’s pre-trade margin analytics.

OpenGamma’s analytics will allow users to manage their funding, liquidity and optimization requirements whereas IHS Markit service will provide margin analytics and calculations to improve efficiencies for OTC derivatives.

The integration is designed to enable clients to manage their pre- and post-trade requirements using a single solution.

MEMX Outlines Five-Point Plan for Connectivity Strategy

The Members Exchange (MEMX) published details of its connectivity strategy on its company blog on June 3. The strategy is designed to reduce industry costs and decrease complexity for market participants trading US equities.

MEMX outlined five key steps in its overall plan: detailing its objectives to use innovative technology to lower costs and promote transparency, to align with major infrastructure providers to simplify adoption and facilitate high performance, to migrate the exchange platform to 25GbE technology to ensure a consistent experience for all members, to enable 25GbE migration to reduce cost, complexity, and latency, and to initially offering 10GbE to direct connect clients, to begin with.

In April, WatersTechnology reported that MEMX had delayed two target dates due to the outbreak of the coronavirus, its launch date, intended for July 24, and the commencement of the platform testing, on May 11. It is unclear as to when the revised deadlines can be expected.

Nice Actimize Acquires Guardian Analytics

Nice Actimize has announced that it is acquiring Guardian Analytics, a provider of cloud-based financial crime and risk management solutions. Guardian Analytics uses real-time behavioral analytics and machine learning technology to detect fraud and anti-money laundering activities.

The joint services will extend Nice Actimize’s capabilities in identifying financial crime and looks to enable higher detection accuracy, lower false positives, and improve operational efficiency. The take over also looks to broaden its coverage of the financial services sector by combining the two firm’s client bases.

The acquisition is expected to close in the latter part of Q4 2020.

Crux Informatics Launches Crux Deliver for Data Suppliers

Crux Informatics has launched Crux Deliver, a managed service for helping data suppliers to improve their delivery capabilities. The service is designed to support the delivery of data quickly and at scale, while helping suppliers by removing the cost of building the infrastructure internally.

Crux Deliver is built to help suppliers deliver data to their customers in more formats, via more delivery methods, and with more tools. It can deliver data in multiple formats including Avro, comma-separated values (CSV), Parquet and through methods such as application programming interfaces, cloud warehouse integrations, SQL and open database connectivity.

As part of the service, the third-party vendor also has a dedicated operations team on hand to help its clients integrate and execute the technology.