Our free FinTech update covers InvestCloud’s partnership with Oppenheimer, Qontigo's ESG hire, and Copper Technologies’s new executives.
Nasdaq Sytem Targets Gap in AML Inquiries
Nasdaq just launched a “cloud-deployed” anti-money laundering (AML) system, the Nasdaq Automated Investigator for AML, that is intended to help financial services firms use IT to detect evidence of money laundering.
The new system has been designed in partnership with Caspian, a company based in Newcastle upon Tyne, in the U.K.
“The financial industry is making a structural shift to more intelligent technologies and real-time adaptive analytics based on much larger, more diverse data pools to detect and investigate financial crime,” says Valerie Bannert-Thurner, senior vice president and head of sell-side and buy-side solutions, market technology at Nasdaq, in a prepared statement. “Through the years of expertise we have gained as an industry leader in trade surveillance, we are both moving beyond our alerting capabilities to investigation, and expanding our solutions to help eradicate illegal money transactions,” Bannert-Thurner says.
The Nasdaq Automated Investigator “ingests alert data from any transaction monitoring system, collates all of the necessary data required for analysis, analyzes the data and then replicates complex human decision making to provide a clear, auditable justification for all alerts regardless of volume, and in seconds,” according to Nasdaq.
“The technology is powered by multiple variants of artificial intelligence including both supervised and unsupervised learning in conjunction with business rules to provide a significant increase in operational efficiency. Beyond AML, Nasdaq sees broad applicability for this new category of solutions that the Nasdaq Automated Investigator has established, and plans to roll out functionality across complementary financial crime segments in the future,” officials add.
The new system is an improvement over “the manually intensive anti-financial crime process” because it automates “all stages of the existing manual alert investigation process to deliver accurate, consistent decision-making at scale,” says Darren Innes, head of AML technology, sell-side and buy-side soutions for Nasdaq, in a statement.
Oppenheimer Signs Strategic Alliance With InvestCloud
Oppenheimer & Co. Inc., an investment bank and wealth manager that is a subsidiary of Oppenheimer Holdings, reports the launch of a strategic alliance with InvestCloud, a provider of software-as-a service (SaaS) and business processes as a service (BPaaS) solutions for financial services firms.
“Central to this strategic alliance,” Oppenheimer says in a statement, “is the creation of a new digital advisor-client web-based portal for Oppenheimer’s Private Client Division.”
That portal is expected to launch in the first half of next year, according to Oppenheimer, and it will be “designed, built, and powered by InvestCloud and will integrate with Oppenheimer’s existing technology infrastructure.”
InvestCloud is based in Los Angeles, with offices in New York, Toronto and London, the fintech vendor notes, adding that it “supports more than $2 trillion in assets across 750+ diverse clients – from some of the biggest banks in the world, wealth managers, institutional investors and institutional asset managers to family offices, asset services companies and financial platforms.”
Qontigo Appoints Global Head of ESG
Rodolphe Bocquet
Zug, Switzerland-based Qontigo, a unit of the Deutsche Börse, reports the appointment of Rodolphe Bocquet as global head of ESG, a newly created position.
“ESG” refers to environmental, social, and corporate governance, three factors that measure the “sustainability and societal impact of an investment in a company or business,” according to the generally accepted definition of the acronym.
Bocquet’s mandate includes leading Qontigo’s “expansion of indexing and analytics in the ESG space,” according to the firm’s statement.
The statement calls Bocquet a “pioneer and innovator in ESG investing,” who “most recently served as an independent sustainability consultant working with a range of clients, including the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank. In 2014, he co-founded and served as Chief Executive Officer of Beyond Ratings, a startup created to better integrate long-term sustainability drivers and their impact on investments. Beyond Ratings was acquired by the London Stock Exchange Group in May 2019.”
Qontigo was formed in 2019 “through the combination of Axioma, DAX and STOXX,” the statement adds.
Copper Tech Names Three New Senior Execs
London, U.K.-based Copper Technologies, a digital asset infrastructure provider, reports the appointment of three new senior executives. Their mandate, Copper says in a statement, is to “lead the company’s international expansion.”
The new executives are Michelle Lai, Jonathan Tse and Doug Bilyk.
Lai will be a senior strategic advisor for the Asia-Pacific region, and will be based in Singapore, officials say.
Tse will be a head of trading in Hong Kong and Bilyk will oversee business development for the United States market, according to the Copper Technologies statement.
Copper Technologies was founded in 2018 and offers a “gateway into the crypt asset space for institutional investors,” according to its statement. Its ClearLoop framework launched in May 2020.
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