Refinitiv Makes ESG Data Free, Accessible Via Voice 

Refinitiv has announced that its environmental, social, and governance company scores are now available for free on Refinitiv.com. Users also now have access to Refinitiv ESG data through the Refinitiv ESG Voice App.      

Making the scores freely available on Refinitiv’s website enables anyone to see the ESG footprint, based on publicly disclosed data, of over 10,000 companies. For any company wanting to submit additional information, there is a contributor tool to enable a disclosure dataset.

The Refinitiv ESG Company Scores are designed to measure a company’s relative ESG performance across 10 main themes, based on publicly available and auditable data. The scores are derived from Refinitiv’s database of 450+ company-level ESG measures. 

Broadridge Launches ESG Advisory Services

To better help companies and investors enhance their ESG programs, Broadridge Financial Services and sustainable investment research and advisory services provider Third Economy have launched an ESG Advisory Service.

The service, leveraging Broadridge’s data and Third Economy’s methodology for evaluating sustainable investment efforts of companies, is aimed at helping corporate issuers and asset managers improve sustainability strategies.

Nikko Asset Management Chooses GoldenSource for Investment Data Management

Tokyo-based Nikko Asset Management ($249.1 billion) has selected enterprise and master data management provider GoldenSource’s Nexus platform.

The Nexus investment data management platform offers the buy side a single platform of interlinked datasets for all market, reference, analytical and reporting data, helping funds to manage complex fund structures and policy trees. 

Causality Link and Eagle Alpha Partner to Supply Data for AI Platform

Financial information technology provider Causality Link and alternative data provider and analytics Eagle Alpha have added Causality Link’s data to Eagle Alpha’s library of alternative data supplied to asset managers, private equity professionals, and corporates.

Causality Link will make available its data from Research Assistant, the firm’s AI-powered platform that processes and analyzes millions of texts in real-time to identify cause-and-effect statements, aiming to help clients to understand the KPIs, events, trends, and causal links that reveal the market forces acting overtime on a commodity, equity, portfolio, sector or industry. The feed also includes data on 10 subcategories related to the ESG factors for public companies.

Crux informatics Closes $36million Round, Announces New Products

Crux Informatics, a data engineering company that manages thousands of data pipelines for companies, has closed a $36million convertible note with its existing investors. The company also announced the upcoming launch of two new products, Crux Protect and Crux Wrangle.

Crux delivers over 14,000 datasets on an ongoing basis and has more than 700 million data files under management. With this financing, the company plans to grow this amount to deliver any dataset from any data supplier to any data consumer via its platform. Crux has signed up hedge funds, asset managers, sovereign wealth funds, commodity trading advisors, banks, fund administrators, exchanges, data vendors, cloud data warehouse providers, and analytics platforms.

Crux Protect is a data quality service that will enable users to run advanced validations. Crux Wrangle is “data engineering as a service”, which aims to allow clients to transform, normalize, and enrich data to meet specific use cases in a managed service.

SimCorp, Colmore Partner for Private Markets Asset Management 

Buy-side investment management solutions provider SimCorp has announced a new partnership with private markets specialist Colmore to deliver a service for private markets asset management.

Colmore monitors over $100 billion in assets, with real-time portfolio monitoring, data management, and transparency into private equity fees. The complete services is now available within SimCorp’s Alternative Investments Manager (Aim). The partnership integrates Colmore’s Insight (data management) and Fair (fee) services within Aim. Insight is powered by proprietary machine learning technology. Fair tackles the complexity of tracking private equity management and incentive fees with a systematic validation service.

Australian Fund Hesta Chooses SimCorp Dimension as a Service

SimCorp also announced this week that the Health Employees Superannuation Trust Australia (Hesta) chose its cloud investment platform, Dimension as a Service, to support its investment management functions. The agreement follows the decision, announced earlier this year, to bring the management of a proportion of its Australian portfolio in-house.

Hesta is an Australian industry super fund for people working in health and community services. The firm wants to use Dimension as a Service across its front office to support its newly-adopted Total Portfolio Approach, delivering multi-asset coverage for the internal management of its Australian equities, cash and fixed interest portfolios.

MTS BondsPro Integrates with TradingScreen 

MTS Markets has announced that its trading platform and alternative trading system MTS BondsPro has been integrated with EMS provider TradingScreen. Market participants with access to MTS BondsPro can now trade bonds electronically with the MTS BondsPro ATS within their TradingScreen interface.

TradingScreen provides centralized connectivity for clients looking to access the credit markets. This partnership is aimed at giving TradingScreen clients greater visibility and access to the liquidity and pricing information available on BondsPro.

Itiviti, Imandra Partner to Reduce Fix Counterparty Certification Time

AI start-up Imandra and financial technology provider Itiviti have announced the integration of Imandra’s Core reasoning engine into Itiviti’s Fix certification and onboarding solution, Conductor, to certify counterparties in hours, rather than days.

The latest release of Imandra’s reasoning engine arrives after six months of R&D. The solution enhances Region Decomposition, a technique for the extraction of edge cases, and automated testing of complex algorithms such as financial trading and communications.

The integrated solution is now available to Itiviti clients needing to test their systems and mitigate risk.  

Temenos Extends Partnership With Schroders for Wealth Front office

Software company Temenos has announced that Schroders Wealth Management in Switzerland has selected its Wealth Front Office to automate its advisory business. Schroders will deploy the portfolio management system on its existing Temenos Transact core banking platform.

Wealth Front Office includes dashboards for relationship and portfolio managers, client and investment profiling, investment proposal process, advanced order generation, pre- and post-trade compliance checks, benchmarking, and performance reporting. it also provides a range of portfolio modeling and rebalancing tools.

BMLL Publishes Survey on Third-Party Data Supporting In-House Quant Research

BMLL and WBR Insights have published new buy-side research exploring how market participants use Level 3 data and analytics in their daily trading decisions to uncover predictive signals for algorithmic performance.

The whitepaper found that high-quality data has become a commonly utilized commodity by most market participants who manage their AUM quantitatively: 74% of respondents said they use Level 3 data in their research program to improve alpha generation and mitigate risk.

The whitepaper can be downloaded from BMLL’s website.

Digital Vega and Spark Systems Partner to Offer FX Trading Solution

FX options e-trading platform and solutions provider Digital Vega and FX trading platform builders Spark Systems have announced a partnership to offer clients a platform for trading FX options, spot, forwards, swaps, and NDFs. The partnership is in response to demand from a broad group of buy- and sell-side users who are looking to access the market using complementary FX trading technology solutions.

“In 2020 we have grown significantly in Asia, adding a Singapore office and extending our client relationships in the region,” says Mark Suter, executive chairman and co-founder of Digital Vega. “During this time, we were introduced to Spark Systems by a firm wanting a single platform to access the FX market. We identified significant synergies, as our services are complementary…”

N-Tier Announces Reference Data Blockchain Solution

N-Tier, a specialist in helping firms manage the accuracy and completeness of their critical reference data, has announced its new consensus-based reference data blockchain solution. 

Leveraging n-Tier’s proven Compliance Workbench platform, the new solution integrates private blockchain capabilities into the reference data management processes of both the data originators and the consumers of that data. This set-up creates a distributed infrastructure for anonymously and securely sharing reference data elements. This enables firms to augment their internal data difference detection and correction processes with those of all other firms on the platform.

“Everyone we talk to spends a tremendous amount of time trying to ensure they have accurate reference data,” says n-Tier founder and CEO, Peter Gargone. “What we see, however, is that they are all doing the same work, trying to keep the same key reference data elements up to date. It became clear to us that if we could connect all these firms through an anonymous and secure blockchain they could all benefit from each other’s efforts, saving everyone a lot of time and money.”