This free fintech update includes news from AcadiaSoft & BNY Mellon, Deutsche Börse & Qontigo, and SpiderRock & QuantHouse.
‘Commission-Management-As-A-Service’ Debuts
Commcise, a provider of integrated commission management, research evaluation, consumption tracking and reporting solutions for investment management and brokerage firms, reports the launch of CommciseCM, a stand-alone, cloud-based commission management platform designed to help U.S. asset managers and hedge funds obtain a “full commission wallet view of their entire trading activity.”
CommciseCM, majority-owned by Euronext, provides asset managers with a “turnkey solution that automatically unbundles every trade (full-service and soft dollar) and additionally provides a technology-based trade reconciliation engine,” which means asset managers “instantly get greater transparency on research spend and can materially increase their spending power with their research providers.”
As a result of Euronext’s majority acquisition of Commcise in December 2018, Commcise’s 600 buy-side and sell-side clients include some of the largest institutional asset managers, hedge funds, brokers and research providers in the world, the firm says.
AcadiaSoft & BNY Mellon Collaborate on CM Service
AcadiaSoft Inc., an industry provider of collateral management services for the non-cleared derivatives community, has officially launched an initiative with BNY Mellon to allow buy-side market participants to manage margin calls, calculations, reconciliations and instruct the movement of collateral “through a single interface,” officials say.
The two companies previously announced a joint offering that outsourced initial margin calculations, as reported in FTF News in May.
“This iteration adds significant new functionality that will enable buy-side clients to concentrate their entire collateral lifecycle through their relationship with BNY Mellon and AcadiaSoft, rather than being forced to split different activities among multiple service providers,” officials say.
AcadiaSoft and BNY Mellon officials add that the initiative will make compliance with the final two implementation phases of the non-cleared margin rules substantially simpler as buy-side firms come into scope in 2020 and 2021.
Chris Walsh
“We’re thrilled to deepen our partnership with BNY Mellon, which is one of the market leaders in collateral management, and we look forward to expanding the connectivity to support collateral segregation of other products,” says Chris Walsh, CEO of AcadiaSoft, in a statement.
Buy-side entities have had “to contend with bifurcated elements in the collateral management workflow” such as segregating collateral with a custodian, calculating margin and issuing margin calls themselves or relying on a central service … and using reconciliation services to resolve margin disputes,” officials says.
“Due to the scarcity of SWIFT messaging capabilities among the buy-side, at the end of a transaction market participants have traditionally had to resort to faxing or accessing dedicated portals to instruct their trade counterparty to deliver the required collateral into their segregated account,” officials add.
AcadiaSoft and BNY Mellon have streamlined these activities into a single workflow that will be available to clients that select BNY Mellon as their segregation agent, officials say.
Deutsche Börse Launches Qontigo
Deutsche Börse Group has unveiled Qontigo, its newly created growth company.
Qontigo combines Deutsche Börse’s STOXX and DAX indices with Axioma’s portfolio construction and risk analytics tools to enable clients to achieve a “competitive advantage in a rapidly changing marketplace.”
The Qontigo acquisition, the bourse says, is designed to address “trends that are reshaping investment management. These include the growth of passive investing and smart beta, the modernization of the investment management technology infrastructure to achieve efficiency and scale, and the transition towards customization of investment solutions.”
The Qontigo acquisition follows the closing of the Axioma acquisition, announced earlier this year, and receipt of required regulatory approvals, the company says.
Sebastian Ceria will become Qontigo CEO.
The Qontigo brand name means “with you,” per the company, and is meant to convey the “spirit of continuous innovation and partnership with clients that forms the foundation of the new company.”
As part of the transaction, Deutsche Börse has entered into a strategic partnership with General Atlantic, a global growth equity investor, which invested approximately USD 720 million in Qontigo, which was used to partly finance the acquisition of Axioma.
Deutsche Börse’s STOXX and DAX index business was valued at EUR 2.6 billion and Axioma at USD 850 million in this transaction, the bourse says.
Qontigo is headquartered in Germany, with locations in New York, Switzerland and London.
SpiderRock Partners with QuantHouse
QuantHouse, a provider of trading solutions, reports that it has added the proprietary data and analytics service of SpiderRock Gateway Technologies to the 150-plus data sources available through the QuantHouse API.
SpiderRock offers option analytics as a service delivered in a normalized binary format, officials say.
“As part of this offering, SpiderRock delivers implied volatility, greeks, risk slides, and volatility surfaces across US-listed equity and futures derivatives in a real-time feed that allows institutional clients to develop and enhance trading and risk management systems,” officials add.
QuantHouse decodes and normalizes market data from global sources, and uses an API approach to simplify workflow across regions and asset classes.
QuantHouse is part of Iress, a technology company providing software to the financial services industry.
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