Johannesburg Stock Exchange Expands Colo 2.0 Service with Beeks and IPC Support

The Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) is advancing its Colo 2.0 service through an extended collaboration with Beeks Group and IPC. In response to rising demand for dual-location disaster recovery solutions, Beeks’ Exchange Cloud service has now been deployed at Teraco’s secondary data centre, aiming to strengthen the JSE’s resilience, ensuring robust infrastructure for the future.

The Colo 2.0 service, launched in September 2023, has quickly become a vital component of the JSE’s operations, offering private cloud computing and low-latency analytics. The strong adoption of this service led to the need for a secondary solution to support growth and disaster recovery. The expansion at Teraco reflects the successful partnership between the JSE, Beeks, and IPC, highlighting a shared commitment to future-proofing financial market infrastructure. The collaboration aims to extend these cloud-based solutions to other exchanges globally.

Baton Systems Launches Advanced Treasury Management Tools for Real-Time Intraday Liquidity Optimisation

Baton Systems, the global capital markets technology provider, has introduced new treasury management tools designed to enhance intraday liquidity management, reduce buffers, and mitigate real-time risk. The tools are designed to help firms to lower financing costs, address increasing regulatory scrutiny, and better navigate volatile market conditions.

Baton’s latest offering provides treasury managers with a real-time dashboard that offers comprehensive insights into liquidity sources across all business lines, enabling improved decision-making and strategy adjustments. By integrating real-time data with historical models, the solution helps predict liquidity demands, optimise payment sequencing, and detect market or counterparty risks. Additionally, stress testing capabilities allow firms to assess liquidity resilience under various scenarios. The new tools are seamlessly integrated with Baton’s Core-Payments platform.

QUODD Partners with Infosel to Enhance Market Data Solutions in Latin America

On-demand market data provider QUODD has partnered with Latin American investment intelligence fintech Infosel, to integrate QUODD’s QX Marketplace content into Infosel’s market data platform, enhancing the analytics and insights available to financial institutions across Mexico and Latin America.

Infosel now leverages QUODD’s comprehensive market data to support banks, investment advisors, and traders through both its platform and customisable white-label solutions. QUODD’s extensive market data includes global equities, fixed income, indices, and mutual fund pricing, while Infosel delivers financial analytics and insights. The collaboration aims to strengthen both companies’ positions in the region’s financial technology landscape.

ESG Book Clients Offered Access to Vyzrd Climate Technology

Sustainability data provider ESG Book is to use Australian firm Vyzrd’s climate risk technology to help clients assess their portfolios’ exposure to threats posed by global warming.

Clients of ESG Book’s SaaS-based platform will be able to use Vyzrd’s Climate Forward analytics to put a value on the risks that assets face from climate change and net-zero transition policies.

Eventus Partners with ANCORD to Offer Validus Trade Surveillance Platform to Brazilian Brokers

Eventus, the trade surveillance and financial risk solutions vendor, has entered a partnership with ANCORD, Brazil’s National Association of Securities, Foreign Exchange and Commodities Brokers and Dealers. Through the collaboration, Eventus’ Validus platform will be accessible to ANCORD members, enabling them to implement a comprehensive trade surveillance solution tailored to their specific needs.

The partnership follows BSM’s recent mandate requiring Brazilian brokerages to independently monitor trading activities to detect regulatory infractions such as insider trading and spoofing. Validus offers extensive automation and adaptability to meet these new guidelines and cope with regulatory changes and data surges.

Eventus CEO Travis Schwab commented: “Brazil has long been focused on protecting investors and ensuring that firms prevent, detect and root out bad behaviour. Our Validus platform is proven in many of the most demanding trading environments globally, and brokers in Brazil can now tap into our expertise and high-performance technology to not only meet regulatory requirements but bring significant efficiencies to their compliance programs.”

Eventus boasts a client retention rate close to 100% and serves a diverse range of clients globally, including Tier 1 banks, brokers, and regulatory bodies.

S&P Global and Accenture Collaborate to Advance GenAI in Financial Services

S&P Global and Accenture have announced a strategic collaboration to drive generative AI (GenAI) innovation within the financial services sector. Central to this partnership is a comprehensive gen AI learning program, set to launch in August, aimed at equipping S&P Global’s 35,000 employees with essential AI skills. The program will utilise Accenture LearnVantage services, offering tailored content to enhance AI fluency across the workforce and meet the industry’s evolving talent needs.

In addition to the learning initiative, the collaboration will enhance AI development and benchmarking within the financial services industry. By integrating Accenture’s Foundation Model Services with S&P AI Benchmarks by Kensho, the partnership will provide financial firms with advanced tools to manage, scale, and evaluate large language models (LLMs). This initiative will allow banks, insurers, and capital markets firms to improve their AI solutions’ performance and efficacy, while maintaining responsible AI practices.

ICE Bonds and MarketAxess to Connect Liquidity Networks for Enhanced Fixed Income Trading

ICE Bonds, a division of Intercontinental Exchange, and fixed-income electronic trading platform operator MarketAxess Holdings Inc., are collaborating to integrate their liquidity networks. The partnership aims to boost efficiency and access to deeper liquidity in the fixed income markets, for the benefit of both the institutional and wealth management sectors.

The integration, establishing connectivity between ICE Bonds’ automated trading system, ICE TMC, and MarketAxess’ Open Trading network, is designed to expand the reach and depth of liquidity pools for each company’s global user bases, promoting enhanced price transparency and best execution. By combining ICE Bonds’ strength in retail brokerage and wealth management with MarketAxess’ dominance in institutional trading, the collaboration seeks to improve overall market liquidity and trading outcomes for all participants.

Taleo to Use CrateDB Data and Tech for Financial Clients

CrateDB’s database services will be used by Luxembourg-headquartered consultancy firm Taleo to help its financial clients with their data management and analytics processes.

Taleo will harness California-based CrateDB’s data to surface real-time insights in the banking, insurance and data management sectors. It will also aid clients in enhancing risk management and compliance capabilities, improve customer experience and loyalty, streamline underwriting processes and optimise portfolio performance, CrateDB said.

Adesso Unveils Compl.AI to Address DORA Contractual Provisions

Global IT services provider, Adesso, has unveiled Compl.AI, a generative AI (GenAI) tool to verify that third-party contracts for critical services are in alignment with the EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA).  

The third-party risk management provisions of DORA require the rigorous oversight of third-party ICT providers, including cloud services providers, to ensure that they don’t become a source of vulnerability. These provisions are crucial for ensuring that financial entities remain compliant with DORA and can effectively manage ICT risks associated with third-party services. 

Compl.AI is delivered ‘as a service’ (SaaS) and leverages GenAI technology and Adesso’s DORA expertise to deliver an automated verification of third-party contracts, at scale, to swiftly identify compliance confidence levels and identify cases that require remediation.   

Libero Raspa, director at Adesso UK, emphasized the challenges financial firms face under DORA and highlighted Compl.AI’s ability to save time, reduce costs, and streamline compliance processes, positioning firms ahead of the January 2025 deadline. 

Adesso, supports over 80 banks in Germany with tailored services that merge technology, expertise, and customer-centric methodologies. Their focus on digital transformation, AI-driven automation, and customer experience aims to enhance competitiveness in the evolving financial landscape.

Writer Builds New LLM for Financial Sector

A new specialised large language model (LLM) has been created by American technology firm Writer for financial services firms based on its Palmyra products.

The Palmyra-Fin-70b model enables firms’ generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) platforms to assist in financial forecasting, investment analysis, risk evaluation, fraud detection, and asset allocation strategies, the company said.

The new LLM is available through NVIDIA, Baseten, Hugging Face and Writer’s own platform. The Palmyra suite of LLMs is already being used by firms including Vanguard, Franklin Templeton and Intuit, San Francisco-based Writer said.