In other FinTech news, the FINRA Test Facility will not be available Thursday afternoon (Dec. 7), and TORA targets MiFID II’s Best Execution via A.I.
Broadridge Targets Next-Generation Investment Strategies
Broadridge Financial Solutions is partnering with Wealthsimple, a digital investing service in Canada, to, automated investment management, also known as “robo-advisory services,” that will support advisor-investor and direct-to-investor models, officials say.
The partnership will integrate Broadridge’s capabilities with the Wealthsimple technology platform, in an effort to “drive efficiencies in client onboarding, compliance, and account transfers,” officials say. In addition, Broadridge’s offerings will gain access “automated investment management, mobile access, and lower-cost ways to invest.”
The Canadian market will be the initial focus of Broadridge’s wealth solutions integration, officials say.
“Our wealth solutions have the unique capacity to support both securities and mutual fund dealers, on a single platform, even though they are separately regulated entities in Canada,” says Michael Dignam, president, Broadridge Canadian Securities Processing Solutions, in a prepared statement.
Wealthsimple’s website and mobile app have become popular with individual investors, officials say. “In just three years, the award-winning company has grown to manage over $1 billion for 50,000 clients in Canada, the U.S., and the U.K.,” officials say. “For its enterprise partners, Wealthsimple builds customized solutions through a dedicated account team, offering real control over the product roadmap and development prioritization.”
The partnership with Broadridge will help Wealthsimple “reach more investors, furthering our mission to bring smarter financial services to advisors and investors,” says Michael Katchen, CEO and co-founder, Wealthsimple, in a statement.
In other Broadridge news, Worldsource Financial Management Inc. and Worldsource Securities Inc. have announced that they are going to use Broadridge’s suite of wealth and mutual fund management technology solutions “as the foundation of its end-to-end business process platforms.”
FINRA Test Facility Unavailable on the Afternoon of Dec. 7
The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) announced that the FINRA test facility (NTF) will not be available for testing “all FINRA Multi Product Platform (MPP) facilities on Thursday, December 7, 2017, starting at 3 p.m. ET until the end of the day on December 7,” officials say.
The FINRA test facility will be available again on Friday, Dec. 8, 2017, “for all FINRA MPP facilities,” officials say.
“This event will affect FINRA’s Trade Reporting and Compliance Engine (TRACE), FINRA’s Trade Reporting Facility (TRF) platform, the Alternative Display Facility (ADF), and the OTC Reporting Facility (ORF). Trade report testing via CTCI, FIX, and the TRAQS Web application, API downloads and vendor feed dissemination from the test region will be affected during this time,” officials add.
The FINRA production environment will not be affected during this time, officials add. “The internal NASDAQ TRF and NYSE TRF Exchange platform testing facilities will not be affected by the FINRA NTF outage during this time.”
Industry participants can send email messages to FINRAProductManagement@FINRA.org or can call + (866) 899-2107.
TORA’s AI for Pre-Trade Analytics Targets MiFID II’s Best Execution
TORA, a cloud-based order and execution management system (OEMS) vendor, has launched its artificial intelligence (AI)-driven pre-trade transaction cost analysis (TCA) solution “designed to help firms meet the stricter best execution requirements imposed by MiFID II,” officials say.
The AI techniques will be used to “accurately estimate price slippage for trades before they enter the market,” officials say.
“Asset managers are increasingly relying on analytics to build more sophisticated, quantitative best execution processes to meet MiFID II’s higher standards and to gain a competitive advantage,” according to TORA officials. “Trading desks are also embracing rapid advances in AI technology to automate and improve the efficiency of their operations. The addition of this pre-trade TCA product to the TORA OEMS enables traders to monitor costs across the lifecycle of a trade and take advantage of new insights to help improve investment decision making.”
The pre-trade TCA solution will use a library of historical global market data, and will examine the core attributes of orders such as “spread, volatility and volume consumption,” officials say. The new function will estimate the “market impact of using any broker and algo combination to help traders determine the optimal place to send their orders.”
“This TCA solution is built upon a convolutional neural network that is trained using real time and historical data. Machine learning algorithms are used to continuously capture new order data as it becomes available. Through this feedback mechanism the network weights are adapted to reflect the additional information and thus increase the estimation precision over time,” says Pascal Kuyten from the TORA quantitative research group, in a statement.
In addition to its OEMS offering, TORA has partnerships with European ARMs and APAs for trade and transaction reporting to provide a way for “funds to quickly transition off older OMS and EMS technology and to simultaneously overcome many of the operational and best execution challenges of MiFID II,” officials say. TORA also offers in-trade and post-trade TCA solutions available on live interactive dashboards and in blotters.
“Best execution is also enhanced via integrations with OTAS and a broad range of broker algo suites accessible across a proprietary low latency FIX network,” officials add.
TORA offers a suite of SaaS-delivered execution, analytics and compliance tools and risk management capabilities. Headquartered in San Francisco, TORA has more than 250 employees across offices in Hong Kong, New York, Romania, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo.
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