In other FinTech news, 32 firms went live with the TradeServ NDF service, a South African firm turned to SmartStream, Sumitomo Mitsui Trust licensed a FactSet index, and Refinitiv launches QA Direct.
IT Consultancy to Join Abacus Group
Abacus Group, which hosts IT solutions and applications for alternative investment firms, is acquiring Hedgepoint Solutions, a boutique IT consulting firm based in New York City whose clients will be able to use the Abacus Cloud platform.
Hedgepoint was founded in 2001 to offer technology services to businesses across various industries and sectors, “with a particular focus on hedge funds, venture capital and private equity firms,” officials say. The acquisition will enable Hedgepoint’s existing clients to access the capabilities and features of Abacus.
“Abacus Group has been doing some amazing things in the hosted IT space, growing not just throughout the US but also internationally into the European market,” says Vick Manocha, managing director of Hedgepoint Solutions, in a prepared statement.
Abacus Group provides investment managers a way to source IT needs as a service, the capacity to scale on demand to meet cybersecurity, storage and compliance requirements, officials say. The company has offices in New York, N.Y., San Francisco, Boston, Dallas, Texas, Greenwich, Conn., Los Angeles, Charlotte, North Carolina, and London.
Financial details about the acquisition were not disclosed.
MarkitServ Racks Up Clients for NDF Service
MarkitServ, an IHS Markit company, has 32 banks and asset managers live with TradeServ a cloud-based platform-as-a-service (PaaS) for post-trade processing of over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives trades.
The TradeServ platform, which debuted in September, offers matching, confirming and clearing trades of non-deliverable forwards (NDFs). IHS Markit officials add that FX options, spots and forwards will be migrated to TradeServ in the first half of 2019, officials say.
In addition, TradeServ will expand to credit derivatives in mid-2019. “It will use blockchain-compatible technology to supply initial trade and trade lifecycle data to the re-platformed Trade Information Warehouse (TIW) from the Depository Trust and Clearing Corp. (DTCC), which will be delivered on distributed ledger,” officials say. “When credit moves to TradeServ, it will mark the retirement of the DSMatch platform currently used to process FX and credit.”
TradeServ also offers a framework to accelerate enhancements to MarkitWire, the MarkitServ platform for interest rate swaps and equity derivatives.
“We’ve built our new platform as a series of interoperable apps, so that when regulation changes or a new standard like SOFR is deployed in the market, we update specific apps which is much easier and faster than updating traditional software,” says Claire Lobo, senior vice president and product head for MarkitServ, in a statement.
Coronation Fund Managers Deploys Corporate Actions Service
SmartStream Technologies, a securities operations vendor, reports that Coronation Fund Managers, a South African fund manager, is now employing its TLM Corporate Actions OnDemand system, to automate the “corporate actions life cycle.”
Coronation is using the SmartStream technology to “process mandatory and voluntary events, including proxy voting for their domestic and international markets,” SmartStream says.
“Through SmartStream’s tailored solution, we achieve automation of our corporate actions operational processes,” Llewellyn Smith, Coronation’s chief operating officer (COO), says in a statement. “Given that this project ran in parallel with a number of strategic initiatives, its successful implementation was essential,” Smith says.
SmartStream, tallies more than 1,500 clients, including 75 of the world’s top 100 banks, eight of the top 10 asset managers, and eight of the top 10 custodians.
Coronation, founded in Cape Town, South Africa in 1993, is 25 percent employee-owned and, as of the end of June 2018, manages R602 billion ($42.8 billion) in client assets, according to the SmartStream statement.
Sumitomo Mitsui Trust to Use FactSet Index
FactSet, a provider of financial information and applications, reports the launch of the FactSet Global Robotics and Automation Index, a “customized thematic index” that it has licensed to Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Asset Management Co., Ltd. (SMTAM), a Japanese asset manager.
SMTAM will use the new index to create a specialized thematic fund, according to a FactSet statement.
SMTAM inaugurated its SMT Index series in 2008 and recently added the SMT MIRAIndex series, which includes MIRAIndex Robo, “benchmarked to FactSet’s Global Robotics & Automation index.”
FactSet tallies “more than 91,000 users,” according to its statement.
Refinitiv Launches Cloud-Based Service
Refinitiv, formerly the financial and risk business of Thomson Reuters, has launched QA Direct, a cloud-based quantitative analytics platform that employs Microsoft Azure.
QA Direct offers a “scalable platform to manage, maintain and integrate quantitative analysis and investment data,” and includes “quantitative alpha models and other third-party content sets allowing customers to explore how their investment hypothesis performs under a broad range of market conditions,” according to a Refinitiv statement.
Employing QA Direct, quantitative analysts, also known as “quants” are able to “spend more time developing and testing investment strategies, optimizing portfolios and managing risk,” according to Refinitiv.
Refinitiv provides data and infrastructure to ”over 40,000 institutions in over 190 countries,” according to the statement.
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