This Week: Refinitiv; State Street/BlackRock; SteelEye; SimCorp; FEX Global/TT

Refinitiv suffers outage in Eikon platform

Refinitiv was hit by a five-hour-long outage on Thursday morning, April 8, which knocked out its Eikon platform for market prices at approximately around 7.30 GMT. The service was fully restored by 13.00 GMT, Refinitiv said in an email sent to customers. 

“The services were stabilized for customers connecting to the APAC and EMEA data centers as of 13.00 GMT,” said the email. “Authenticating servers in the AMER [Americas] region had been stable since 9.10 GMT.”

First reported by Reuters, users of the service said on Twitter they were unable to access several of the services and pricing information used for trading FX and other asset classes. Following the incident, the exchange group announced it would investigate the outage and will provide further details of the glitch “in due course via MyRefintiv”.

The disruption comes a month after Anna Munz, chief financial officer at London Stock Exchange Group, which recently acquired Refinitiv, said on its full-year 2020 earnings call that it would have to spend more on the Refinitiv integration and resolving technical issues than originally anticipated by analysts. Munz said that roughly £700 million ($960 million) of the projected £1 billion ($1.4 billion) would be used to cover legacy costs and expenditure across LSEG and Refinitiv.

M&G Corporate selects State Street middle office services via BlackRock’s Aladdin

M&G Corporate Services Limited, the parent company of M&G investments, has appointed State Street to provide outsourced middle office services via BlackRock’s Aladdin platform, licensed by M&G.

The outsourced middle office functions will include portfolio management, reference data, cash reporting, transaction management, asset servicing and record-keeping. The service model incorporates the use of Aladdin Accounting and Aladdin PDX messaging.

The agreement extends M&G and State Street’s multi-year strategic partnership, during which the investment firm has used State Street’s fund accounting and custody services for more than a decade. As part of the arrangements, a number of M&G employees may transfer to State Street in London.

The latest announcement follows efforts made by State Street and other buy-side servicing firms to collaborate with rival firms to offer joint services. A recent example is State Street’s partnership with SimCorp in December 2020, which enables insurance firms to pick tech and services between the two competitors.

SteelEye solidifies new rounds of capital to fund US expansion

UK-based compliance technology and data analytics firm SteelEye has raised $17 million through two rounds of funding in 2020 to finance its expansion into North America.

The first round was led by Fidelity International Strategic Ventures alongside existing investor Illuminate Financial and the most recent second series of capital was led by Beacon Equity Partners in December. As part of the funding arrangements, Ed Mullen, founder of Beacon is joining the SteelEye board.

The new lease of capital will support SteelEye’s efforts to grow its footprint in North America and service US regulatory obligations.

The vendor delivers software as a service regulatory technology to banks, brokers, and asset managers for complying with EU, UK and now US market regulations.

SimCorp wins five new clients for its data as a service offering

Front-to-back-office technology provider SimCorp has acquired five new global clients for its data as a service offering, SimCorp Datacare.

SimCorp could not provide the names of the clients due to client confidentiality, but the wins span insurance, pensions, asset management and sovereign wealth funds.

The Datacare service, hosted on the cloud, initially launched in partnership with Zurich Insurance, its first client, in April 2020.

FEX Global partners with Trading Technologies to provide access to client-base

FEX Global, the newly launched Australian Futures Exchange, has signed a deal with Trading Technologies to distribute the TT platform to its client base.

Exchange trading participants on FEX Global can now access all listed futures and options on the market via the TT platform and use its full suite of tools, including functionality for spread and algo trading, charting and analytics, mobile trading, options, FIX services, and API development. Using the TT platform users can trade a range of traditional and emerging products spanning across the energy, commodity and environment asset classes.

FEX Global launched its futures exchange on March 26. It is licensed to provide a range of energy, environmental and commodity-based futures, and options contracts, cleared via CME, focused primarily at servicing the Asia/Pacific region.