This Week: SGX/Cassini, UBS/GitLab, QuantConnect & Snowflake

SGX Partners with Cassini for UMR Prep

Singapore Exchange (SGX) and derivatives analytics vendor Cassini Systems have partnered to provide a free service to SGX market participants that should help them meet requirements outlined by the uncleared margin rules (UMR). Under the agreement, SGX will leverage Cassini’s domain expertise to provide market users with complimentary analyses to determine their average aggregate notional amount (AANA), representing the gross value of open, non-centrally-cleared derivatives positions.

International regulators use AANA to determine whether a firm falls in scope for each phase of UMR, with Phase 5 scheduled to take effect in September 2021. In-scope entities are subject to a mandatory exchange of Initial Margin (IM) with their counterparties for their bilateral over-the-counter (OTC) agreements over the $50 million IM threshold per counterpart. While the consecutive three-month period for officially determining in-scope status for Phase 5 will come in 2021, SGX and Cassini are offering the service in advance so firms potentially meeting the $50 billion AANA threshold can take steps now to assess their status, adjust their positions, and look for alternatives to certain non-cleared products.

Firms affected by Phase 5 include banks, asset managers, hedge funds, and pension funds.  Phase 6, scheduled to take effect in September 2022, has a threshold of $8 billion AANA.

UBS and GitLab Sign Multi-Year Partnership Contract

UBS and GitLab, both members of the Fintech Open Source Foundation (Finos), have entered into a multi-year strategic partnership to collaborate on software development and cloud projects.

The goal is to enable UBS’s engineers to develop in the cloud and bring value to the bank by using DevOps and an agile software development approach. This is expected to increase quality and decrease time-to-market significantly; UBS expects to more than double the speed of software engineering by the end of 2021. 

Head of UBS group technology Mike Dargan says GitLab will be a fundamental part of the organization’s cloud journey going forward.

“In addition we expect this technology to enable us to engineer our cloud native applications as well as our traditional banking applications from one platform,” he says.

GitLab offers a single application for the entire DevOps lifecycle that aims to increase efficiency by eliminating communications between different tools, and decreases maintenance costs. Developers, operators, and auditors have access to the same information and thus the ability to drill down from a global view to a single repository.

• READ MORE: Mike Dargan spoke with WatersTechnology about how virtual desktops kept workers plugged in during the pandemic. Click here to read more.

QuantConnect Increases Access to Alpha Streams Marketa

Crowd-sourced algorithmic trading platform QuantConnect has lowered its minimum AUM threshold for trading firms looking to license algorithms from $100 million to $10 million, meant to facilitate the growth of emerging funds and managers.

The news comes after July’s announcement that QuantConnect would be restructuring its subscription model to boost institutional membership on the platform. The new subscription framework, QuantConnect Organizations, allows individuals and trading firms to better deploy their resources via a pay-per-seat and pay-per-service model, similar to how cloud providers operate.

Snowflake Files for IPO

Cloud-based data warehouse Snowflake announced it filed a registration statement on Form S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission relating to a proposed initial public offering of its Class A common stock. The number of shares to be offered and the price range for the proposed offering have not yet been determined. Snowflake intends to list its Class A common stock on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “SNOW.”

Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, Allen & Company, and Citigroup will act as lead book-running managers for the proposed offering. Credit Suisse, Barclays, Deutsche Bank Securities, Mizuho Securities, and Truist Securities will act as book-running managers for the proposed offering. BTIG, Canaccord Genuity, Capital One Securities, Cowen, D.A. Davidson & Co., JMP Securities, Oppenheimer & Co., Piper Sandler, Stifel, Academy Securities, Loop Capital Markets, Ramirez & Co., and Siebert Williams Shank will act as co-managers for the proposed offering.

• READ MORE: Snowflake is looking to tackle the data problems faced by asset managers and exchanges. Click here to read more.