Our FinTech roundup covers Xignite’s new suite; BNY & Deutsche Bank’s FX solution; BNPP Securities Services digitizes docs & NewB picks Wolters Kluwer.
‘Empower Innovation 2020’ to Launch in the Fall
LabCFTC, the fintech incubator of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), will launch “interactive virtual events throughout the fall,” as a replacement for the 2020 Fintech Forward conference. The in-person conference has been canceled “in light of the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic,” officials say.
The three-part series has been dubbed “Empower Innovation 2020,” and the effort “will facilitate a dialogue among innovators, regulators, market participants, and the public around cutting-edge fintech innovation,” according to the CFTC. “Empower Innovation 2020 will consist of a combination of fireside chats, digital roundtables/panels, and ‘Tech Talks’ from foremost industry experts. Registration will open in August and a detailed agenda is forthcoming.”
“COVID-19 has demonstrated why fintech innovation is critically important,” says Melissa Netram, LabCFTC director and CFTC chief innovation officer, in a prepared statement. “Empower Innovation 2020 will focus on cutting-edge financial technology and innovation, educate on emerging technology and innovation practices of today, and discuss the impact of technology and innovation during the pandemic,” Netram says.
The CFTC reports that the Empower Innovation 2020 Fall Sessions will cover:
- Thursday, September 24: “The Power of Innovation: Where Tech & Crisis Collide. This session will feature a dialogue about the impact and necessity of technology and sustainable innovation in a time of global crisis;”
- Wednesday, October 21: “Regulation and Innovation Re-imagined. Coinciding with DC Fintech Week, this session will feature a panel discussion addressing how regulators respond to financial innovation;
- Thursday, November 19: “The Future of Finance. This session will examine how novel solutions and forward-thinking strategies used within the industry and the CFTC will shape our world in the years to come.”
In addition, LabCFTC will announce via the series the winner of Project Streetlamp, a competition that LabCFTC launched in April under the Science Prize Competition Act at the November Empower Innovation 2020 even, officials say.
Register for the “Empower Innovation 2020” event and LabCFTC updates at https://bit.ly/3gJGjsa
Xignite Microservices Suite Targets Market Data Ops
Xignite, a provider of market data processes and procedures for financial services and technology companies, reports that it will be launching Xignite Enterprise Microservices.
The new suite is intended to help financial services firms “store, distribute, manage and control market and financial data in the cloud,” according to Xignite. In particular, Xignite describes its new service as a “suite of cloud-based market data management services intended to aid firms and others that want to move any/all of their current datasets including Bloomberg, Refinitiv and FactSet to the cloud.”
The suite is the “culmination of over 10 years of nonstop innovation,” says Stephane Dubois, founder, and CEO of Xignite, in a prepared statement. “We have taken the cloud-native architecture that has powered some of world’s most prominent fintechs and scaled it to meet the unique requirements of institutional players that consume huge amounts of data but often have no way of integrating and optimizing it in an efficient and cost-effective way.”
The vendor’s cloud-based architecture “currently supports more than 250 different data sources and 12 billion API calls per day for over 750 of Xignite’s fintech and financial services clients.” An API, or application programming interface, mediates interactions between different types of software. The service’s initial user is NICE Actimize, a provider of financial crime, risk, and compliance solutions.
BNY & DB Launch Custody FX for EM Currencies
BNY Mellon and Deutsche Bank report the launch of a jointly developed foreign exchange (FX) solution that exploits application programming interface (API) technology to “improve confirmation times for restricted emerging-market currency trades,” officials say.
“The digital solution, initially being applied to custody FX transactions in Korean Won, aims to reduce the pre-trade lifecycle to seconds from hours, minimizing the operational burden and manual intervention that can be prevalent in emerging market custody FX,” officials say.
The banks report that the solution is live in Korea, “with the Indonesian Rupiah and the Indian Rupee targeted next,” officials say. “Subsequently, it will be progressively rolled out to a broad range of restricted currencies, which are linked to investors’ underlying equity or fixed-income transactions.”
The solution leverages “existing bots between the two banks for instantaneous communication to help eliminate market frictions,” according to the banks, which add that the offering can “bring trade remediation closer to the time of execution.”
“With this partnership, we are not only seizing an opportunity to alter back-office processing in restricted markets, but more importantly, we are providing front-office users with faster execution and enhanced workflow transparency,” says Jason Vitale, global head of FX at BNY Mellon, in a prepared statement.
BNPP Securities Services Digitizes Key Documents
BNP Paribas Securities Services reports that it has automated the processing of “key asset servicing” substantiation. BNPPSS calls it a “major milestone in the bank’s digital transformation program.”
The documentation program “took 12 months to implement,” BNPPSS notes.
The program “aims to enhance back office operational efficiency, increase straight-through processing rates and reduce services turn-around times for the benefit of the bank’s clients,” according to BNP Paribas.
Following the digital overhaul, BNP Paribas Securities Services points out that it is “now able to automatically capture, extract and classify data from documents such as fund prospectuses and order confirmations. The resulting structured datasets are then fed directly into the bank’s operational systems.”
The bank has so far automated the processing of 500,000 documents a year, per BNP Paribas.
NewB Selects Wolters Kluwer’s OneSumX
NewB, which characterizes itself as “the Belgian ethical bank,” has picked Wolters Kluwer’s OneSumX for Risk Management to “manage its asset and liability management (ALM) requirements as well as its liquidity risk.”
The ALM component of OneSumX for Risk Management derives from Wolters Kluwer’s platform, which provides “balance sheet modeling, stress testing and dynamic planning,” Wolters Kluwer says in the vendor’s press release about NewB.
“The goal of NewB is to offer simple and transparent banking services which follow the principles of sustainability and ethics. As such we require highly reliable and intuitive technology to ensure we manage our risk profile,” Jean-Christophe Vanhuysse, NewB’s executive director, says in the statement. “Wolters Kluwer has an excellent reputation in the ALM and liquidity areas and so the company’s … technology offers an excellent fit for us.”
Wolters Kluwer’s finance, risk and reporting business is part of Wolters Kluwer’s governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) division. The division offers services “focused on legal entity compliance, legal operations management, banking product compliance, and banking regulatory compliance,” per the statement.
The parent company, Wolters Kluwer N.V., headquartered in Alphen an den Rijn, the Netherlands, notes that it offers services in the health, tax and accounting, risk and compliance, finance, and legal sectors.
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