In other news, Baton taps FIS Global, SIX debuts ETF sanctions screening, Genesis hires from Adenza & JPMorgan likes DeepSee.ai.
BondWave Builds New Links to ICE Bonds
Fixed income solutions vendor BondWave reports that has much more tightly integrated its Effi Markets with the transaction platforms of ICE Bonds, part of the Intercontinental Exchange, so that Effi users can have better access to liquidity pools and execution protocols.
“BondWave and ICE Bonds have enjoyed a great partnership for many years,” says Michael Ruvo, CEO of BondWave, in a prepared statement. The additional level of integration will improve transparency and workflows for Effi users.
Effi Markets helps clients access “indicative liquidity by enabling users to view, filter and select current bids and offers, add them to a proposal and communicate relevant trade ideas,” according to the vendor. “The integration will allow BondWave users to filter the market data and stage orders for submission to an ICE Bonds’ platform from the Effi Markets page.”
BondWave works with bids and offers from the ICE BondPoint and ICE TMC trading platforms operated by ICE Bonds, officials say. ICE Bonds offers trading protocols for fixed income markets such as click-to-trade, portfolio trading and request for quote. The ICE Bonds trading protocols access liquidity in municipal bonds, corporates, treasuries, agencies and certificates of deposit.
Baton Taps FIS Global for EMEA Sales Director
Alistair Griffiths
Baton Systems, a fintech specializing in post-trade processing employing distributed ledger technology (DLT), reports the appointment of Alistair Griffiths as director of EMEA sales.
Griffiths joins after a previous post as senior sales executive of post-trade solutions at FIS Global, “where he led sales for the UK, Channel Islands and the Netherlands.”
“He has deep expertise in the industry, having worked for some of the largest and most respected institutions in the world including Bank of New York Mellon, BlackRock, and UBS,” Baton Systems says in a statement, which also notes that at BNY Mellon. “Alistair built up eight years of experience in collateral management, sourcing and growing the firm’s tri-party collateral management activity across the global market.”
Griffiths will report to Alex Knight, Baton’s global head of sales, and will be based in London. His mandate includes “focusing on new business acquisition across all Baton solutions in the region.”
Baton Systems was founded in 2016. “EMEA” is an acronym that stands for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. — L.Ch
SIX Launches ETF Sanctions Screening
SIX, a financial information and exchanges company, has added exchange traded funds (ETFs) sanctions screening to its Sanctioned Securities Monitoring Service (SSMS), following its acquisition of ULTUMUS in July 2021, officials say.
“With heightened sanctions scrutiny, there is greater need for banks, asset managers and wealth managers to have transparency into all types of indirect investment vehicles, including ETFs,” according to the official announcement. “To address this market need, SIX has created a new module to provide a broad analysis of the constituent securities of ETFs.”
With the ULTIMUS technology, “the SIX service now tracks and monitors ETFs, in addition to equities, bonds, structured products and options, to enable compliance with global regulatory jurisdictions and safeguarding our clients against compliance and portfolio risks,” says Oliver Bodmer, senior product manager, financial information for SIX, in a prepared statement
If an ETF includes sanctioned securities, “SIX supports clients in identifying this change through access to daily sanctions data for most major regimes. This helps to minimize the risk level and protect market participants from compliance breeches or investment strategy misalignments, while also protecting the portfolio value should the sanctioned securities contribute to an impact on liquidity and devaluing of the ETF,” officials say.
“Increased requirements from the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) to ensure all funds are screened for sanctions has added another layer of complexity for market participants with regards to their ‘sanctions compliance,’ ” Bodmer adds.
Genesis Global Hires Calypso’s Former CTO
Genesis Global, which characterizes itself as a “low-code application development platform purpose-built for financial markets organizations,” reports that Tej Sidhu has been named its chief technology officer.
Sidhu will report to Stephen Murphy, the vendor’s chief executive officer. He will “‘lead more than 200 developers and technologists at Genesis,” per the statement.
James Harrison, a co-founder of Genesis and chief technology officer (CTO) since 2015, will now “focus on engaging with Genesis’s largest clients as they make the Genesis platform a cornerstone of their technology strategies,” the statement adds.
Sidhu was CTO and head of research-and-development head at Calypso (now Adenza), for 16 years. At Calypso, he oversaw the growth and modernization of the platform and pivoted the company’s technology strategy in response to the global financial crisis in 2008. In the last year, Sidhu was CTO at Umba, an Africa-focused digital bank.
Genesis is “[s]trategically backed by Bank of America, BNY Mellon and Citi,” and maintains offices in Miami, New York, Charlotte, London, Leeds, São Paulo, Dublin, and Bengaluru, per the statement. — L.Ch
DeepSee.ai Added to JPMorgan’s ‘Hall of Innovation’
Vendor DeepSee.ai has been inducted into JPMorgan Chase’s Hall of Innovation, which “recognizes select emerging tech companies for their innovation, business value, and disruptive nature.”
“DeepSee has helped us automate manual post-trade checks supporting complex derivatives trading into AI-powered business outcomes,” Tom Damico, global head of equities operations, JPMorgan Chase, says in a prepared statement. “We’re already seeing efficiencies in post-trade processing and reconciliations, with more efficient deal review timeframes and more importantly, reduced operational risk.”
With DeepSee’s “cloud-agnostic approach,” the firm says in a statement, heads of business lines can:
- “Solve a diverse set of manual, error-prone, and cost-heavy business problems;”
- “Adapt to the new culture of a decentralized, hybrid-first workforce;” and
- “Prepare for the next crises or economic disruption.” — L.Ch
