Our FinTech roundup covers news from Intapp, DealCloud & S&P, BNP Paribas, RIMES, BBVA, FinIQ and ThetaRay.
TORA Adds Two New York-Based Traders
A provider of outsourced trading systems, TORA, maker of a cloud-based order and execution management system (O/EMS), reports the addition of two traders to its outsourced trading team: Mark Mazor and Joe Zonenshine.
Mazor has more than 15 years of experience as a trader, working as a global execution trader for Partner Fund Management and Balyasny Asset Management, the firm says in a statement. Zonenshine spent 16 years trading at Aristeia Capital and Blackwells Capital, according to the statement, which notes that he also worked as investment banking analyst at Lehman Brothers in New York.
TORA offers its execution support to hedge funds and asset managers around the world. Based in San Francisco, the firm notes that it has 250 employees across offices in Hong Kong, Jersey, New York, Romania, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo.
Intapp & DealCloud Integrate S&P Data and Insights
S&P Global Market Intelligence is allowing native integration of its data products into the Intapp OnePlace and DealCloud platforms to provide clients with “native integrations” for more efficient onboarding of new clients, execution of deal-making activities, and client lifecycle management, officials say.
“OnePlace Risk and Compliance provides professional service firms with the solutions they need to thoroughly evaluate new business, quickly onboard clients, and easily monitor relationships,” according to S&P Global Market Intelligence. The new data flow is intended to help clients “easily identify corporate conflicts and receive automatic notifications as circumstances change — all inside the Intapp OnePlace platform.”
The DealCloud DataCortex helps firms manage proprietary and third-party data via a unified platform, helping them run complex reports, analyze industry trends, and “visualize data in the same hub where deals are originated and relationships are managed,” officials say.
A division of S&P Global, S&P Global Market Intelligence integrates financial and industry data, research and news into services that help track performance, generate alpha, identify investment ideas, perform valuations, and assess credit risk, officials say.
BNP Paribas Names Head of CIB Latin America
Florence Pourchet
BNP Paribas has named Florence Pourchet head of corporate and investment banking for Latin America. The appointment is effective immediately.
Her mandate from the bank is to “help drive BNP Paribas’ Latin America strategy, as well as provide oversight and support to the various countries in the region where the bank has a presence.”
She has been with the BNP Paribas since 1990, and has held a “variety of banking and credit roles across France, Germany and the U.S., and was most recently appointed Head of CIB Hispanic Latam in 2019, in addition to Head of Credit and Portfolio Management and Head of CSR for the Americas.” (The acronym CSR stands for corporate social responsibility.)
Pourchet will “retain her responsibilities as Head of CSR for the Americas, advising Herve Duteil, BNP Paribas Americas Chief Sustainability Officer, as the bank continues to build out its leadership position in Sustainable Finance,” according to a statement from the bank, based in Paris.
RIMES Service Targets E.U. Regulatory Compliance
RIMES, a data management and regulatory technology solutions vendor, has launched the RIMES RegFocus BMR Dashboard, to help asset managers understand their exposure under the E.U. Benchmarks Regulation (BMR), officials say.
The new suite is targeting a “significant compliance challenge for the buy-side” as some firms do not have the centralized data management practices that help manage compliance risks, according to RIMES. Many firms have found it a challenge to manage “which administrators and benchmarks are, and are not, authorized for use in the E.U.”
The new BMR Dashboard, accessible via RIMES Online, “leverages relationships with the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), national regulators and benchmark administrators to track the index landscape and generate accurate and timely reports for firms’ compliance needs,” officials say.
Vendor officials say the RIMES BMR Dashboard helps asset management firms understand: their BMR exposure with simple graphs; the status of actual benchmarks and individual index return variants; view administrators’ benchmark statements and related documentation; check if given indices are permitted under BMR; how to research 3.3 million indices for onboarding workflows.
BBVA & FinIQ Launch Website for Structured Products
Spanish banking giant BBVA, in partnership with FinIQ, a fintech company, reports the launch of BBVA epricer, a website for its equities- and credit-linked structured products.
BBVA says the new website is “designed to help professionals structure and obtain prices for equity and credit linked investment products that aim to either provide an enhanced yield or exposure to the underlying investment.”
The bank references the new environment, “where remote work has become the new normal,” and points out that its epricer website “provides a digital channel for BBVA clients to request from the simplest to the most exotic investment proposals.”
ThetaRay Offers ‘Fast Start’ for Financial Crime Probes
ThetaRay, a vendor of data analytics based upon artificial intelligence, has launched Fast Start, to address the needs of financial services firms grappling with a rise in cyber-crime during the Covid-19 pandemic, officials say.
The Fast Start offering consists of ThetaRay’s financial crime platform made available via a cloud deployment “up and running within 30 days to provide banks with immediate support at a time when bank fraud and money laundering scams are significantly increasing,” officials say.
“The Covid-19 pandemic has shellshocked industries around the globe, but banking has been hit particularly hard — not just because of the virus, but also the bad actors taking advantage of the crisis, as well as cost and operational pressures inside the banks themselves,” according to ThetaRay. “Hackers are using the chaos as a distraction to launder money and lure a vulnerable public into fraudulent schemes, using coronavirus fears and the promises of stimulus checks.”
The vendor has made Fast Start available in three cloud packages: Fast Start for AML Alert Triage; Fast Start for AML Detection & Monitoring; and Fast Start for Enterprise Fraud Prevention.
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