BNY inks AI deal with Google, Broadridge moves proxy voting to AWS, Expero delivers ICE market data, and more

It’s nearly winter in London, which means an intense gray fills the sky, and a bone-chilling cold begins in mid-December and lingers until April.

It’s like living inside your own tears. Anyway, the news…

Announced this week

BNY, S&P Global make separate AI deals with Google Cloud

BNY and Google Cloud have integrated Google’s agentic AI platform, Gemini Enterprise, into BNY’s AI platform, Eliza, to boost BNY’s research capabilities for market analysis. BNY’s employees will now be able to build AI agents to process, synthesize, and analyze financial reports, relevant data, and historical trends to extract insights and navigate financial information more efficiently.

Separately, S&P Global has signed a multiyear strategic partnership with Google Cloud to expand the data provider’s access to agentic AI tools. The partnership will advance S&P Global’s data distribution by making its proprietary data available on BigQuery, Google Cloud’s cloud data warehouse for large-scale data analytics. S&P Global will also expand its agentic offerings on Gemini Enterprise, where customers can interact with proprietary S&P Global data.

Broadridge migrates proxy voting platform to AWS

Broadridge announced a development in its global proxy modernization program with the migration of its Shareholder Disclosure Hub (SDH) to Amazon Web Services, improving the platform’s resiliency and security while expanding its reach to include Singapore and South African markets.

The move aims to reduce operational complexity for market participants by supporting shareholder disclosure requirements across all markets in the European Economic Area, as well as Australia, Hong Kong, the UK, and the newly added markets of Singapore and South Africa. This expanded solution enables institutional investors, intermediaries, and issuers to meet regulatory disclosure obligations efficiently and securely across multiple jurisdictions.

SmartTrade buys Kace in multi-asset coverage deal

Multi-asset electronic trading provider SmartTrade acquired Kace Financial, previously known as Fenics, a fintech offering foreign-exchange and interest-rate derivatives pricing, analytics, and workflow solutions.

By integrating Kace, SmartTrade enhances its trading and payments platform with deeper insights, AI-driven analytics, and advanced machine-learning capabilities across all asset classes. The integrated solution will be delivered via a SaaS model, enabling faster deployment, greater scalability, and reduced total cost of ownership for clients.

TSX Venture Exchange partners with Chainlink to supply market data on-chain

Real-time TSX Venture Exchange market data is now available on blockchain networks through crypto network operator Chainlink and its institutional-grade publishing service, DataLink.

This marks the first time that TMX Datalinx’s regulated exchange data from TSX Venture Exchange has been made available on blockchain networks. Through DataLink, more than 2,400 DeFi protocols in the Chainlink ecosystem across 40 public and private blockchains can now access TMX Datalinx’s market data.

Expero to deliver ICE market data through Connected Finance platform

US-based consultancy Expero announced an agreement with the Intercontinental Exchange to bring ICE’s cross-asset data and analytics into Expero’s Connected Finance platform, enabling clients to integrate market data into trading, advisor, and investor workflows.

The deal marks an expansion of ICE’s data distribution capabilities to include widget-based delivery for wealth management, retail investing, and brokerage platforms. In addition to ICE’s traditional data delivery channels, such as feeds, file delivery, and desktop terminals, customers can now leverage ICE data in charts, dashboards, and other interactive tools for faster and easier analysis and visualization.

What you might have missed from us

Citadel Securities, BlackRock, Nasdaq mull tokenized equities’ impact on regulations

Crypto-native firms Robinhood, Coinbase and Galaxy Digital Holdings and traditional finance shops Nasdaq, BlackRock and Citadel Securities debated the ramifications of equity tokenization during a meeting of the SEC’s Investor Advisory Committee.

One consideration of fitting tokenized assets into existing law is dependent on whether regulatory authorities classify tokens as securities or commodities, as this distinction determines which parts of existing securities law will apply to the assets. While the previous SEC administration decided to regulate tokens as securities, current SEC Chair Paul Atkins has indicated that there is room for flexibility.

Nasdaq, which recently proposed changing its definition of “security” as part of a filing to allow the trading of tokenized securities on the exchange, “see[s] the tokenization of securities as not only something that can be built under current rules but also something that should be, representative Chuck Mack, head of strategic operations and public policy, said at the meeting.

FIX Trading Community recommends data practices for European CTs

The FIX Trading Community has released recommendations for using the FIX Protocol in the European consolidated tapes for equities and bonds, available on its website. The documents showcase how firms can use the FIX Protocol to convey data elements defined in the final RTS document for the EU tapes. These define the logical messages that can be implemented with any of the encodings supported by FIX.

Jim Kaye, executive director of FIX, says that even if firms are not planning to use FIX as their messaging format, they should read the document anyway because it contains other information about how to use the messages regardless of their format.

FIX is also working with the European Securities and Markets Authority and the ISO 20022 Secretariat to build in features to support the consolidated tapes, and to leverage ISO 20022’s expansibility and interoperability to map to FIX messages.

Waters Wavelength Ep. 342: LexisNexis Risk Solutions’ Sophie Lagouanelle

This week’s podcast guest is Sophie Lagouanelle, vice president of product for financial crime compliance at LexisNexis Risk Solutions. She joins Wei-Shen Wong to talk about the current financial crime landscape and what new developments in AI and machine learning mean for the space.

Google, CME say they’ve proved cloud can support HFT—now what?

CME, the world’s largest futures and options exchange, and Google hope that their recent work, which demonstrated that cloud can support high-frequency trading, allows greater participation in ultra-low-latency markets and provides a boost to the ongoing initiative around overnight US equities trading.

The firms worked with consultancy 28Stone, who used CME equity data and Google Cloud’s C3 machines to test and meausre market data ingestion, decision, and order transmission, while recording latency, jitter, and throughput under increasing message rates. The results show that cloud setups can now achieve a median round-trip time of 15 microseconds and a 99th-percentile RTT of 22 microseconds, effectively closing the performance gap that historically kept high-frequency trading tethered to physical datacenters.

Though there is a prevailing thought that the cloud is not good for trading, Scott Caudell, exchange and ecosystem architect at Google Cloud, tells WatersTechnology, that advances in benchmarking and infrastructure have shifted “the conversation from ‘plausible’ to ‘possible.’”

Everyone wants to tokenize the assets. What about the data?

In the latest IMD Wrap, Wei-Shen looks at the recent slew of articles about tokenization taking over the capital markets. She says that while the process of tokenizing assets is captivating the attention of many financial services firms, there hasn’t been an equal level of attention devoted to market data in a decentralized environment.

Putting market data on-chain raises some questions for Shen. What does this mean from a data licensing perspective? Does consuming market data on-chain require a whole new set of data licensing agreements? Or do the existing “TradFi” data licensing models work?

And don’t forget: Licensing is already a bit of a touchy subject among data consumers, exchanges, and aggregators…

In other news

Why One Man Is Fighting for Our Right to Control Our Garage Door Openers, The New York Times

I think the premise behind this story is close to a lot of what we write about on WatersTechnology. Dissatisfied with the corporation-controlled options to operate his “smart” garage door, an upstate NY-based IT professional in his mid-forties created his own product: the RATGDO, or Rage Against The Garage Door Opener.

What follows is an unlikely David and Goliath story that I think is especially American. It’s about garage doors for starters, but it’s also about free market purchasing power and corporate enshittification. However, what really caught my eye was the last section of the story.

“For Mr. Wieland, the fight isn’t over. He started a company named RATCLOUD, for Rage Against the Cloud. He said he was developing similar products that were not yet for sale.”

Cloud is expensive, and just this year I’ve written about how that factor doomed a fixed-income vendor, caused European corporations to attempt to make their own cloud giant, and made exchange operators like Nasdaq and NYSE sweat over costs of Consolidated Audit Trail data. Democratizing access to cloud services is a tough job, especially if the plan is to break the hegemony of Google, AWS and Microsoft. It’ll be interesting to see if anyone can mount a challenge to the Big Three in 2026.