This Week: Trading Technologies, Goldman Sachs/Digital Asset, SimCorp/Citi and more

Trading Technologies to be acquired by 7Ridge

Trading software provider Trading Technologies (TT) has agreed to be acquired by 7Ridge, a growth equity firm invested in financial technologies. 7Ridge will fuel TT’s organic growth and enable the vendor to make targeted strategic acquisitions in the future. Cboe Global Markets and Singapore Exchange, which are among the limited partners of the fund managed by 7Ridge, have voiced their support of the transaction.

Under the new ownership, TT will remain independent and focused on delivering enterprise-wide solutions for institutional and professional trading.

Shortly after the acquisition closes, it is expected that Tim Geannopulos, current chairman of the board and CEO, will leave his current role while remaining actively engaged with the company. Keith Todd is then expected to be appointed CEO to lead the company as it embarks on its next growth phase. Todd currently serves as the chairman and CEO of KRM22, and previously held positions at Ion Group and FFastFill.

Goldman Sachs chooses Digital Asset to build open platform for tokenized assets

Digital Asset, a software and services provider helping enterprises build economic value through interconnected networks, has announced that Goldman Sachs will use Daml, Digital Asset’s core technology, to develop its end-to-end tokenized asset infrastructure supporting the digital life cycle across multiple asset classes on permissioned and public blockchains.

SimCorp and Citi Securities Services announce strategic alliance around data integration

SimCorp and Citi have entered into a strategic alliance in which Citi Securities Services will integrate post-trade custody data with SimCorp to offer a front-to-back user experience for their mutual clients.

The collaboration brings together SimCorp’s technology and service solutions with Citi’s proprietary custody network spanning over 60 markets to help clients navigate the challenge of data consolidation and consumption, and enhance productivity.

The integration between SimCorp and Citi is an extension of Citi’s data services offered through their data and analytics platform, Citi Velocity Clarity, which allows clients to interact with and gain insights from their data, with prioritized workflows and analytics, through one single platform. Citi’s clients benefit from access to faster, up-to-date data including access to near-real-time post-trade data from across Citi’s broader network.

Citi’s Clarity platform continues to expand its data integration and delivery framework, facilitating such initiatives alongside real-time API consumption and visualizations.

Cboe Global Markets plans 2022 launch of Cboe Fixed Income

Cboe Global Markets has announced plans to introduce a new dealer-to-dealer electronic trading platform for on-the-run US Treasuries. The platform, Cboe Fixed Income, will be Cboe’s first cash US fixed-income product offering, further diversifying and expanding its products, services and technology offerings into new markets and geographies. The launch of Cboe Fixed Income is planned for the second quarter of 2022, subject to regulatory approvals.

The new trading platform is designed to better enable dealers in US Treasuries to efficiently source liquidity and trade in size, while reducing market impact.

Cboe Fixed Income will bring Cboe’s Full Amount technology, which enables large order risk transfer with low impact, together with its liquidity curation and analytics capabilities to further enhance trading in US Treasuries. Through the Full Amount matching protocol, liquidity consumers will be able to transact against the best quote from a single liquidity provider, while satisfying the full amount of the order to help minimize information leakage and slippage. Trades will print in single executions, reducing ticket costs.

Confluence to acquire Investment Metrics 

Confluence Technologies, an investment management technology provider, has agreed to acquire Investment Metrics for $500 million. Investment Metrics is a global provider of investment data, performance, analytics, and research software solutions that help institutional investors and advisors achieve better financial outcomes, grow assets, and retain clients with clear investment insights.

This acquisition advances Confluence’s portfolio analytics offering and expands its reach into the asset owner and asset allocator markets following its previous acquisition of StatPro in 2019.

Finos and EDM Council partner to accelerate CDMC framework

The Fintech Open Source Foundation (Finos) is partnering with the EDM Council, a cross-industry trade association for data management and analytics, to accelerate the implementation of the Cloud Data Management Capabilities (CDMC) framework via end-to-end, open-source testing and infrastructure-as-code suite. The CDMC framework ensures a comprehensive set of standard guidelines for financial firms and other industries as they move their data into the cloud. This partnership was spearheaded by Morgan Stanley and the London Stock Exchange, members of both EDMC and Finos.

Officials say the partnership will deliver value to many different entities, such as risk managers at banks who will have a provable way of demonstrating cloud compliance. Cloud service providers, fintechs, and technology companies will be able to confidently and compliantly deliver their services, while consulting firms can specialize in proving compliance and certification to the CDMC standard. Additionally, regulators can use the CDMC Open Source implementation for evidence of enforcement and for tapping into open source talent to do so.

CQG launches suite of execution technologies

CQG, a global provider of technology solutions for traders, brokers, commercial hedgers, and exchanges, has launched a suite of execution technologies designed to give market participants new tools to achieve greater efficiencies and optimal trade execution, particularly for large or complex order types.

The suite was built on the infrastructure of software assets CQG acquired from Blue Trading Systems (BTS) in June 2020. It also leverages technology CQG has been developing in recent years, aimed at providing smart trade execution opportunities for buy-side and sell-side firms that can improve pricing, provide increased visibility of aggregating different markets, and enable large global firms to efficiently match client orders in a regulatory-compliant fashion. CQG vice president of execution technologies Kevin Darby, formerly co-founder of BTS who joined CQG last year to lead the integration of the software, is helming the new execution technologies business unit.

The offering is available through multiple platforms, including CQG Integrated Client, CQG Desktop and various CQG-supported APIs.

Pico launches the Corvil 10000

Pico, a provider of technology, data and analytics services for the financial markets, has launched a new flagship appliance, the Corvil 10000. This launch builds on the capabilities of its performance monitoring and analytics solution, Corvil Analytics, for electronic financial markets.

Officials say the Corvil 10000 establishes a new high bar for sustained throughput, with real-time accuracy and granularity, to support rising trading and data volumes in financial markets.

Corvil is deployed on Pico’s resilient proprietary network, PicoNet, a globally comprehensive, low-latency and fully redundant network connecting major financial datacenters with access to major public cloud providers. Pico recently introduced a 100Gbps pure optical backbone network in North America, and the Corvil 10000 is central to providing transparency into network performance and real-time telemetry for this higher capacity network.

Gleif, OS-Climate and Amazon collaborate for development of climate-aligned financial applications

A collaboration between the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (Gleif), OS-Climate, and Amazon has resulted in Gleif’s real-time open Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) datasets being made publicly available for the first time in the cloud, via the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI) data catalog. Building upon its long-standing relationship with ASDI, the move was driven by OS-Climate to allow easier integration of LEI data with its own datasets, which supports the development of open data and open-source analytics for climate risk management and climate-aligned finance and investment.

ASDI’s hosting capabilities simplify programmatic access to the LEI data, which connects unique entity identifiers to verified business reference data enabling clear and unique identification of legal entities participating in financial transactions. OS-Climate ingests and transforms this raw data into its Data Commons platform, which provides a streamlined architecture for building, sharing, and running data and analytics services for evaluating climate finance risks and opportunities.