This Week: Sk3w, HKEX, JSE, Finos, and more

Sk3w Technologies secures series A funding for latency standardization solution

Sk3w Technologies has raised $7 million in a series A round led by investment firms Tower Research Ventures, IMC, and Citadel Securities to support the vendor’s system that allows an exchange to monitor and standardize latency between itself and trading firms’ datacenters.

Exchanges purchase the Sk3w hardware, which places a connection on the customer end of the fiber cable and plugs the exchange end into the Sk3w system. Once in place, exchanges can monitor the speed of the connection—and mandate latency across their customer base. “This is a way of giving control back to the exchange,” says co-founder Craig Mohan, who spent nine years at CME Group.

Mohan says fairness and transparency are crucial, but not all trading firms are happy. “There were some firms that, when we were through the investment process, said, ‘We’re not really sure we like this; we actually kind of liked the advantage that we get sometimes by not having this problem solved,’” Mohan says.

But for many firms, including backers IMC, Citadel Securities, Optiver, Jump Trading, Tower Research Ventures, and XR Trading, fairness is a way to cut costs, as standardization eliminates the incentive to compete on latency. The money spent on trying to out-maneuver competitors on speed is “not generally seen as being value added,” Mohan says. “That’s ultimately why, if you look at our investors, it’s all big trading firms: They immediately understood the problem.”

The fiber currently in use by some venues is imperfect, says Mohan. In some cases, a venue might have installed it 10 years ago and not touched it since. Without monitoring or standardization, this is difficult to assess.

As Sk3w wraps up the funding round and deploys pilot testing at exchanges, it intends to use the funds to continue scaling the business and hiring engineers. “By having this set of firms behind us, they’re all saying, ‘Yeah, we want to see this solved. We think this is a good thing. We believe in transparent markets. And this is how we’re going to support that. Ten years ago, things were measured in milliseconds, then it went to microseconds, and then it’s nanoseconds. And every time something like that changes, all of this becomes just a little bit more important,” Mohan says.

ACA, LeapXpert partner for employee messaging surveillance

ACA, a governance, risk, and compliance advisory for financial services, has partnered with LeapXpert, a business communications monitoring platform, to offer firms increased surveillance of employees’ WhatsApp, iMessage, SMS, WeChat, Telegram, Line, and Signal messages.

The mobile messaging capture technology allows oversight of employee communications through LeapXpert’s integration into ACA’s Compliance Alpha eComms platform. Users will have access to a policy-based surveillance engine, relationship forensics, and an archive of employee messages.

The integration also allows employees to use Microsoft Teams to message a client on their preferred messaging app.

Clearwater Analytics launches ‘first’ generative-AI investment tool

Clearwater Analytics, a provider of investment management technology offered on a software-as-a-service (SaaS) basis, has announced Clearwater-GPT, which the vendor claims is the first generative AI solution for investment management. Clearwater says the software will be available from the second half of 2023.

Clearwater-GPT will create content for investor interaction as well as provide data insights and performance comparisons for investors. This will allow investors to compare their portfolios to their competitors.

JSE, big xyt team up for white-labeled data analytics platform

The Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) and big xyt, a data and analytics provider, have partnered to offer a white-labeled data analytics distribution platform. The new company, big xyt ecosystems, a joint venture between the two firms, will use JSE’s existing platform, Trade Explorer, to enable trading venues to distribute their data to customers using their own branding.

The goal of the partnership is to offer Trade Explorer, which launched in South Africa earlier this year, to financial centers around the world.

Amundi Intermédiation taps FlexTrade to consolidate multi-asset EMS

Amundi Intermédiation, a European execution management provider, has selected FlexTrade Systems, a multi-asset execution and order management software vendor, to consolidate all asset classes onto one execution management system (EMS) platform. FlexTrade’s FlexTrader EMS platform will be distributed as Amundi Intermédiation’s centralized EMS platform.

This move will allow Amundi Intermédiation to further automate and electronify its fixed-income capabilities and bond execution. Using FlexTrade’s Fixed Income Smart Order Router (Fisor), bond dealers can access consolidated pre-trade data to further automate their execution process. The company’s existing multi-platform processes will be replaced with the single fixed-income EMS.

This project will be delivered in multiple phases, beginning with equities and derivatives, which are now live. Fixed income is set to be deployed by the end of 2023.

Nammu21 launches database of live US loan data

Digitization and analytics platform Nammu21 has released a database of publicly available US loan agreements. The database, called N21 Public, isolates, extracts, and normalizes loan data found in 10-Q and 10-K filings.

The N21 Public database contains information on more than 5,000 syndicated and bilateral loans that have been disclosed in US public filings since 2018. The database will be updated with new loan data on an ongoing basis.

In addition to the database, N21 Public leverages a large language model (LLM) to answer user queries and facilitate the analysis and comparison of data.

An initial feature called LCI, focused on lender and commitment data, helps users locate information on financial institutions, their commitments across filers, borrowers and sectors, and across facility types and currencies. The company hopes to add more features in the future, providing access to different parts of the syndicated loan ecosystem, including ESG and pricing.

Finos unveils open standard project for cloud controls

The Fintech Open Source Foundation (Finos) has announced the formation of a collaborative project to agree on consistent controls for public cloud deployments in financial services. The project was initiated by Citi, and more than 20 other firms have agreed to participate, including BMO, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, RBC, London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG), Natwest, and a host of vendors.

The open-standard project aims to mitigate the systemic risk of cloud concentration by developing a single set of cybersecurity, resiliency, and compliance controls for common services across the major cloud service providers (CSPs). It will also draw up a unified taxonomy of common services and associated threats and threat techniques.

The project will begin a formation stage in August and become available under the Community Specification License later this year.

HKEX, Indonesia Stock Exchange sign cooperation agreement

Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Ltd. (HKEX) signed a memorandum of understanding with the Indonesia Stock Exchange (IDX) this week in Jakarta. The partnership will foster cross-border listings between the two markets, joint product development, and sustainable finance in Asia through ESG initiatives.

The memorandum aims to strengthen the global position of the Indonesian capital market. Both parties plan to cooperate closely on new opportunities and product development in the region.