This Week: SimCorp/JP Morgan; SGX/TNS; Barclays/MarketAxess and more

SimCorp and JP Morgan collaborate with new front-to-back integration

Investment management solutions provider SimCorp announced a new collaboration with JP Morgan’s securities services. Available to mutual clients, the front- to middle-office and custody integration addresses investment operations challenges, including post-trade processing. The integration aims to tackle the costly and fragmented investment processes that contribute to operational risk, such as the high rate of settlement trade fails seen in recent months. 

The automated sharing of intra-day, multi-asset data is meant to enhance key investment workflows, from tax reclaims to proactive risk management of unprocessed trades. Augmented exception commentary will provide compliance teams with greater context, indicating action ownership for faster settlement, reducing the number of failed trades.

Solidus Labs secures $20 million series A funding

Crypto-native risk monitoring and market surveillance vendor Solidus Labs announced it has secured $20 million as part of its series A funding round, led by Evolution Equity Partners. Additional participating investors include Hanaco Ventures, which led Solidus Labs’ seed funding round in early 2019; 645 Ventures; crypto exchange FTX; and Avon Ventures, a venture capital fund affiliated with FMR, the parent company of Fidelity Investments.

This funding round also includes angel investors with regulatory, compliance, capital markets, and cybersecurity experience. These participants include former Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) chair Christopher Giancarlo, former Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) commissioner Troy Paredes, former CFTC chief innovation officer Daniel Gorfine, StarCompliance founder Marc Epstein, International Securities Exchange founder David Krell, AngelList founder Naval Ravikant, SecurityScorecard founders Sam Kassoumeh and Aleksandr Yampolskiy, entrepreneur Jeff Fagnan, and Takoma Group founder Alex Acree.

The funding will enable Solidus Labs to continue developing its technology, which supports digital assets and blockchain, while mitigating the new risks they introduce. The company plans to significantly expand its Tel Aviv and London research and development offices in order to address the demand for its solutions, as well as to grow its sales, regulatory affairs, and product teams. Solidus Labs also plans to open offices in East Asia and other high-demand markets.

SGX and TNS to enhance co-location options and market access for traders

Singapore Exchange (SGX) and Transaction Network Services (TNS) are working together to expand the range of hosting, co-location and connectivity options available to traders wishing to access SGX’s derivatives and securities markets. TNS can now offer its full suite of services, including TNS Layer 1 raw market data and order routing, from a new managed hosting presence within the Tier 1 area of SGX’s datacenter.

Housed in one of Singapore’s datacenters, SGX’s co-location service provides several tiers of hosting services to serve a range of requirements. It offers multiple levels of bandwidth and capacity for transfer of data and reports a round trip network latency of fewer than 100 microseconds.

Isda expands clause library to include collateral documentation

The International Swaps and Derivatives Association (Isda) has announced the expansion of the Isda Clause Library to cover Isda’s collateral documentation, a development that aims to bring efficiency and standardization to the negotiation and collateral management processes.

The expansion follows the publication of the Isda Clause Library for the Isda Master Agreement in June 2020, which aimed to bring greater consistency in the drafting of clauses when there is no need for customization. By adding standard drafting options for frequently negotiated provisions within Isda’s collateral documentation, the Isda Clause Library reduces complexity within industry-standard documentation, makes contract negotiation quicker and more efficient, and improves the consistency and accuracy of legal agreement data.

To develop the Isda Clause Library, Isda conducted a review of thousands of agreements to identify clauses that essentially achieve the same outcomes, even though they may be worded differently. The resulting data feeds into the Isda Legal Agreement Taxonomy, which establishes a framework for identifying and categorizing commonly used clause variants. Standard drafting options are then made available in the Isda Clause Library that achieve the same outcome as the clause variants within a category.

SIGTech integrates with IHS Markit Data Lake

Quant trading technology provider SIGTech announced that it has integrated with IHS Markit’s Data Lake. The integration facilitates access to more than 1,500 proprietary datasets curated by IHS Markit, enabling quantitative fund managers to seamlessly access these financial and alternative datasets in making investment decisions.

This is the first time that IHS Markit’s Data Lake has been integrated with a quant trading platform. It contains proprietary alternative datasets with a long history, compiled by IHS Markit’s 5,000 analysts, data scientists, financial experts, and industry specialists. SIGTech platform users can now access these datasets, gaining insights to build, test and execute new trading strategies.

In the initial phase of the Data Lake integration, SIGTech has onboarded IHS Markit’s global securities finance dataset, which offers analytics on short-seller demand, supply, and borrow costs. The securities finance dataset provides transparency into short interest dynamics to support investment decisions and derive alpha generation. SIGTech and IHS Markit will onboard further datasets over the coming months.

Accelex secures $5 million in seed round

Accelex, a data acquisition, analytics, and reporting solution for private markets investors and asset servicers, has announced the close of a $5 million seed round of venture financing co-led by Illuminate Financial and AlbionVC, with participation from Expon Capital and SixThirty Ventures.

The company says this funding will fuel its global growth ambitions through further product development, client acquisition, and support. Illuminate Financial and AlbionVC will join Accelex’s board of directors as part of this transaction.

Since the launch of the Accelex platform 12 months ago, the company has achieved significant growth—now supporting a global client base of investors and asset servicers with a combined asset base of over $300 billion, invested in more than 3,500 private markets funds across 1,100 managers.

Barclays adds streaming firm pricing to MarketAxess’ Live Markets order book

MarketAxess announced that Barclays has committed to become a dedicated market-maker and is actively contributing streaming prices for US investment grade corporate bonds to the MarketAxess Live Markets order book for institutional credit markets.

Leveraging the anonymous all-to-all MarketAxess Open Trading marketplace, Live Markets provides a single view of two-way, actionable prices for the most active US investment grade bonds, including recently issued debt, benchmark issues, and news-driven securities. Live Markets gives institutional credit investors and dealers the ability to place resting live orders in the market and engage firm prices provided by dealers and investors with a single click.

Barclays joins Goldman Sachs and another systematic-dedicated market-maker as a streaming liquidity provider in Live Markets.