This Week: S&P to link Visible Alpha with Capital IQ; BlackRock/Securitize and more

S&P closes Visible Alpha deal, preps integration with Capital IQ

S&P Global this week closed its previously announced acquisition of consensus forecast estimates provider Visible Alpha for an undisclosed sum. The company also outlined plans to integrate the company and its 700 staff into S&P Capital IQ Pro.

Visible Alpha was founded in 2015 by Scott Rosen, who had previously worked as entrepreneur-in-residence at TheMarkets.com, which was acquired by S&P Capital IQ in 2011. Following the acquisition, Rosen spun out his area of focus—the spreadsheet models developed by sell-side firms’ research departments to distill their impressions of a company—with a consortium of bank backers. Rosen served as CEO of Visible Alpha until 2020, before Mark Hale, a 22-year FactSet veteran, took over as head of the company. Rosen stayed with the company as chief research and innovation officer

Like TheMarkets, Visible Alpha will become part of S&P’s Capital IQ Solutions business line. It will continue to be available as a standalone product, as well as an add-on to Capital IQ Pro, and in the future will be further enhanced with the addition of Capital IQ content. In the near term, S&P plans to make the Visible Alpha content available over its XpressFeed and cloud distribution platforms. Then, it will combine the back-ends of both companies’ estimates data platforms, before making the Visible Alpha data available on the Capital IQ desktop.

Describing the rationale behind the acquisition, Warren Breakstone, head of Capital IQ Solutions at S&P Global Market Intelligence, tells WatersTechnology, “We look for differentiated assets that—when combined with other assets from S&P—can drive value in clients’ workflows. Visible Alpha was able to innovate in a space that hasn’t seen much innovation in many years.”

Bringing the Visible Alpha and Capital IQ together will give users a broader view of a company’s health and the Street’s expectations for it, based on both historical and forward-looking measures, Breakstone says.

“So, when you conduct research on a company, it’s important to understand how that company has performed historically, how it is performing today, and how it’s expected to perform in the future—and forecasts across a swathe of relevant KPIs [key performance indicators] tells you how a company is expected to perform.”

While being part of S&P will increase its channels to market, allowing Visible Alpha to reach more potential clients, it will also allow the vendor to reach a broader range of clients, including sell-side firms and corporate clients, Hale says.

“The super majority of our business is on the buy side—institutional asset managers and hedge funds, with some sales to corporates and investor relations. We don’t currently sell to the sell side, but we’re partners with more than 200 sell-side firms globally who contribute their models to us.”

The deal also allows S&P to broaden its reach among certain client bases, adds Breakstone.

“We’re especially excited about the opportunities with corporates. For example, an [investor relations] officer trying to understand market expectations of their own company, their competitors, and the area they operate in. Or a corporate development officer looking for potential targets for acquisition,” he says. “Or, if you [are a buy-side analyst and] have a view on a company, is that in line with the consensus of the market, or different? And if you are seeing something different from the consensus, that may be an opportunity.”

Appital integrated into Portware EMS

Appital, a peer-to-peer price discovery and liquidity sourcing technology for asset managers, announced that Appital Insights is now fully integrated with FactSet’s Portware Execution Management System (EMS). As a result, Portware’s asset management clients can access Appital Insights liquidity with one click via their EMS. In addition, the new ‘Live Watchlist’ functionality available within FactSet Portware EMS allows buy-side institutions to assess the viability of executing larger average daily volume (ADV) orders without alerting the market.

Securitize secures $47m funding round led by BlackRock

Tokenization vendor Securitize announced the completion of a $47 million funding round led by BlackRock. The strategic investment also includes funding from Hamilton Lane, ParaFi, and Tradeweb Markets. Securitize will use the capital to accelerate product development, expand its global footprint, and further strengthen its partnerships across the financial services ecosystem.

As part of the investment, Joseph Chalom, BlackRock’s global head of strategic ecosystem partnerships, has been appointed to Securitize’s board of directors.

“At BlackRock, we believe that tokenization has the potential to drive a significant transformation in capital markets infrastructure. Our investment in Securitize is another step in the evolution of our digital assets strategy,” said Chalom in the announcement.

Juan Delgado, Hamilton Lane co-CEO: “We are committed to making the private markets accessible to a broader set of investors, including through digital first, token-based technology.”

Chris Bruner Tradeweb’s chief product officer “Tokenization has the potential to drive greater efficiency and accessibility across financial markets.”

Other strategic investors in the round include Aptos Labs, Circle and Paxos.

The funding round coincides with the launch of BlackRock’s first tokenized fund issued on Ethereum, the BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL), available to investors by subscribing to the fund with Securitize.

Prometheum selects Broadridge for post-trade lifecycle and back-office operations

Prometheum Capital, a subsidiary of Prometheum Inc., announced it has selected Broadridge Financial Solutions for back-office solutions as the firm prepares to launch its full-suite of custody, clearing, and settlement services for digital asset securities. Through the deal, Prometheum will deploy Broadridge’s Shadow Post-Trade Processing Solution and Business Process Outsourcing offerings.

SGX FX unveils AI offering to enhance FX desk decision making

SGX FX, through its eFX and digital assets trading solutions provider for global sell-side institutions, MaxxTrader, has released the latest version of its AI tool, which gives financial institutions access to faster and more informed foreign exchange (FX) trading decisions.

The tool curates FX and digital assets prices, as well as trade data, before automatically generating tailored, actionable insights to a stakeholder. It analyses multitudes of FX data like trades, price streams, user activities, execution quality, market impact, and profitability.