In other FinTech news, BNP Paribas collaborates with GTS again, the DTCC has a DLT update, Citco’s Æxeo Treasury targets treasury operations, and DriveWealth and Trading Central partner.
A Major Buy-Side Firm Embraces AcadiaSoft’s IMEM
AcadiaSoft, a provider of risk and collateral management services for the non-cleared derivatives market, reports that Brevan Howard has been added to the users of AcadiaSoft Hub’s Initial Margin Exposure Manager (IMEM).
As one of the first buy-side firms that falls within the scope of Phase Three of the non-cleared margin rules that went into effect in September of this year, Brevan Howard is now reconciling two-way initial margins with its derivatives trading counterparties under the non-cleared margin rules via IMEM, officials say.
IMEM is an end-to-end , initial-margin reconciliation and calculation service that was developed to bring firms into compliance with the new regulatory requirement to collect and post IMs held in a segregated account, according to an AcadiaSoft statement, which notes that the service “reduces complexity in agreeing margin amounts on a two-way basis by reconciling initial margin exposure calculations.”
IMEM is available through the AcadiaSoft Hub.
BNP Paribas & GTS Extend Collaboration into U.S. Equities
French banking giant BNP Paribas and a New York-based high-frequency trading firm, GTS, are extending their collaboration via a new memorandum of understanding (MOU) that will help them move into U.S. equities markets. The MOU was recently signed at BNP Paribas’ annual flagship global markets conference in London, and builds upon the duo’s foray into U.S. Treasuries.
“The GTS initiative with BNP Paribas is a game-changer for clients. We are putting the most sophisticated A.I. and machine learning to work with outstanding results,” says Ari Rubenstein, co-founder and CEO of GTS, in a statement. “The overall outcome is tighter spreads, lower costs and overall price improvement when accessing the equities and fixed income markets.”
BNP Paribas and GTS launched their first strategic collaboration in November 2017, which helped BNP Paribas leverage GTS’ trading and technology capabilities for the US Treasuries secondary market. “Since the collaboration, BNP Paribas’ secondary electronic market share with clients in U.S. Treasuries has grown from 1.5 percent to 4.0 percent,” according to BNP Paribas.
DTCC Tests Systems for Distributed Ledgers for Credit Derivatives
The Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. (DTCC) reports that it has advanced to the testing phase of its project to re-platform its credit derivatives Trade Information Warehouse on distributed ledger technology (DLT) and the cloud.
Fifteen of the world’s largest banks are “conducting end-to-end tests, leveraging simulated use cases and test data and validating the interaction between systems, firms and other market infrastructure providers,” DTCC says.
DTCC expects to move to an “open” testing phase for market participants and service providers by the end of the year.
Testing is anticipated to be completed by the first quarter of the new year, per DTCC.
Citco’s Æxeo Treasury Offers Centralized Treasury Payments
The Citco Group of Companies, a services provider for the financial services industry, reports the launch of Æxeo Treasury, a software-as-a-service (SaaS).
Æxeo Treasury is Citco’s “inaugural cloud solution for alternative fund managers,” the vendor says.
It offers a “method of managing treasury functions through a SaaS process on Amazon Web Services,” Citco says, improving operational efficiencies and workflows, and providing a “secure, centralized module for treasury operations.”
Æxeo Treasury’s cloud-based information structure includes “multiple” Amazon Web Services “availability zones” and includes “full features for SWIFT compliance,” per Citco.
Amazon Web Services provides an “infrastructure platform in the cloud that powers hundreds of thousands of businesses in 190 countries around the world,” AWS says, noting that it currently maintains data center locations in the United States, Europe, Brazil, Singapore, Japan and Australia.
DriveWealth & Trading Central Form Strategic Partnership
DriveWealth, a leader in global digital trading technology, has a new partnership with Trading Central, a vendor of financial market research and investment analytics, in a bid to match digital investing to financial content.
The new relationship is intended to allow the two companies to leverage complementary elements of their businesses — “digital, mobile-first transaction capabilities and accessible and actionable financial content,” officials say.
The move targets “investors and financial advisors around the world by putting together relevant financial content that drives investment decisions with a seamless digital investing experience and state-of-the-art execution capabilities,” says
Robert Cortright, CEO for DriveWealth. “Working with Trading Central allows us to bring a complete investment solution to a wide range of market participants.”
DriveWealth has customers and partners in more than 140 countries that rely on it for digital access to the U.S. securities market for investors around the world, officials say. Trading Central offers market solutions that combine analyst research and patented pattern recognition with 24-hour global multi-asset coverage.
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