Buy-siders invest in private-markets platform, Broadridge expands crypto dealings, and more

On March 7th, Patrick McGarry hopped on his bicycle in San Diego, California, to begin a 3,000-mile journey across the US that will end in St. Augustine, Florida, on April 20th. His sister, Katie McGarry Noack, had been at WatersTechnology’s (then, simply known as Waters) first-ever event, which was held at the World Trade Center’s Windows on the World on September 11, 2001.

The goal of his Pacific-to-Atlantic journey is to raise $100,000 for the Tunnel to Towers Foundation, which provides mortgage-free homes to Gold Star and fallen first-responder families with young children. 

To read more about his incredibly inspiring reason for doing this—and to donate to his goal—click here.

To hear him talk about his story, click here.

Even though his “Ride to Remember” has started and McGarry has reached his goal, every dollar received will still go to a worthy charity.

Announced this week

Fidelity, Hamilton Lane, others invest in private-markets platform 

Corastone, a platform for private-market investing, announced Fidelity Investments, Future Standard, and Hamilton Lane as investors in the startup and its alternative-investing operating platform.

“We’ve seen firsthand how operational complexity can limit participation in private markets, and have prioritized building or investing in technology that aims to enhance transparency and efficiency,” said Griff Norville, head of technology solutions at Hamilton Lane, in a statement. Corastone’s platform removes that friction, which we believe will help unlock the industry’s next growth phase.” 

Nasdaq partners with Boerse Stuttgart’s Seturion on European tokenization

Nasdaq unveiled a new partnership to drive the modernization of Europe’s capital markets infrastructure through tokenized trading and settlement. This collaboration aims to bring together Nasdaq’s European trading venues with Seturion, Boerse Stuttgart Group’s pan-European settlement platform for tokenized assets. 

This follows an earlier announcement about Nasdaq’s intention to launch an equity token design in the US, to facilitate the tokenization of US equities.

Credit-focused hedge fund taps Clearwater Analytics 

Orange Investment Advisors, a credit-focused investment manager, has implemented Clearwater Analytics’ Enfusion platform to modernize its front-to-back investment operations across its structured credit portfolio.

“We didn’t want another tool that solved one piece of the workflow and created new handoffs everywhere else,” said Jay Menozzi, chief investment officer at Orange, in a press release. “We chose Enfusion because it brings PMS, OMS, and execution workflows together in one place, with a shared data model. This gives our teams a single source of truth from trade capture through reporting, with fewer breaks, clearer controls, and faster answers when clients ask questions.”

Solve adds muni, corporate bond data to platform 

Solve, which provides pre-trade data and predictive pricing for fixed-income securities, has added augmented quote data for municipal bonds and USD-denominated fixed-rate corporate bonds to its Solve Quotes platform. This will help provide calculated price, yield, and spread data points when those data points are either not present in the original quote message or were calculated using a different methodology. 

Broadridge and Crypto.com partner 

Broadridge Financial Solutions announced the integration of Crypto.com with its NYFIX order routing network worldwide, while also marking NYFIX’s first cryptocurrency integration in Asia. This collaboration enables crypto order to flow through the same FIX-based infrastructure used across global financial markets.

What you might have missed from us

Pennsylvania entity files antitrust suit against Cusip Global Services 

A little-known non-profit called the Global Infrastructure Finance & Development Authority has filed an antitrust lawsuit in a US federal court against Cusip Global Services and its owner, FactSet. Gifda alleges it has been shut out of the US capital markets after CGS refused to activate identifiers for its securities.

Gifda, which is seeking financing for a string of heavy infrastructure projects in the US and Mexico, is a registered 501(c)(3) with tax-exempt status in the US. But its tax filings to the US Internal Revenue Service since 2018 state that its gross receipts are not greater than $50,000; it has never filed a Form 990, a requirement for US non-profits that make more than $200,000 in revenue per year and have more than $500,000 in assets. Despite this, Gifda’s website shows a portfolio of projects worth between $21 billion and $40 billion each.

The new suit uses some of the same allegations in the ongoing class-action lawsuit against CGS, FactSet, CGS’ former operator S&P Global, and Cusip’s patent holder, the American Bankers Association. The latest lawsuit contests Cusip’s status as the national numbering agency, while the class action is fighting CGS’s data licensing and use policies.

To read our extensive coverage pertaining to legal disputes about Cusips, click here.

Market data cost increases slow, but prices still outmatch budgets

A new whitepaper from Substantive Research and BCG Expand finds that, after five years of tracking, the exponential growth of market data prices has begun to slow. Average renewal increases for major vendors were between 14% and 18% from 2022 through 2024, but that figure dipped to 10% in 2025. The researchers credit AI and greater attention from C-suite business heads as reasons for the decline.

LSEG ‘acted in bad faith’ in MayStreet acquisition, new court filing alleges

Lawyers for MayStreet co-founder Patrick Flannery have filed a new motion stating that his lawsuit against London Stock Exchange Group, which alleges fraud and breach of contract by the exchange operator, should move forward. It’s the latest salvo in a lawsuit that was originally filed in Delaware’s Court of Chancery last May. LSEG and its legal representation have until April 2 to respond to Flannery and further support their motion to dismiss. 

SigTech’s closure amid agentic AI boom raises questions

It was first reported last month that SigTech, an AI-powered portfolio analytics platform spun out of Brevan Howard, abruptly closed its doors late last year. WatersTechnology spoke to five former SigTech employees and one client with knowledge of the matter to get a better understanding of how and why things went wrong in such a favorable environment for AI companies and tools.

“The concept of [SigTech’s Magic platform] can now be created so easily by frontier models,” says one former engineer. “[Open-source AI agent] Openclaw is so much better than any of the work we’ve done for Magic.”

Jump Trading CIO: Prop AMMs allow users to create ‘a mini Jump Trading’

While the term “automated market-maker” has been around for a while, a new advancement in the space has caught the eye of Jump Trading: prop AMM, a mash-up of DeFi infrastructure and concepts with proprietary trading. Dave Olsen, chief investment officer for Jump, says this is a significant evolution.

“It wasn’t a term I was familiar with a few months ago—not sure how many people in the audience would be [familiar with it] today. … The ability to fit code into that format has advanced very substantially to the point that you’re effectively creating a mini Jump Trading or quantitative trading firm in an autonomous piece of code.”

This is the first of three stories filed from the Futures Industry Association’s annual conference in Boca Raton, Florida.

CME’s Duffy addresses outages as exchanges push toward 24/7 trading

At FIA Boca, CME Group CEO Terry Duffy answered questions about a spate of embarrassing outages across the company’s various exchanges, which came at a time when exchanges are looking to expand their equities trading hours. Nasdaq is looking to start with 23/5 trading, and it would seem that 24/7 trading—or something very close to it—is inevitable. But first, exchanges will have to prove their infrastructure can withstand the stresses of continuous trading.

“I think that we’ve been really focused on driving towards 23/5 trading in the US market,” said Nasdaq CEO Adena Friedman. “And which, frankly, [means] aligning ourselves a bit more with the futures markets because they’ve been in a 24/5 market environment for a long time.”

Sprecher says ICE will expand positioning in crypto, prediction markets

Intercontinental Exchange CEO Jeff Sprecher told FIA Boca attendees that the company will look to expand its presence in the cryptocurrency and prediction markets. 

“We have two new [chairmen at] the SEC and CFTC that are working to try to pull the entrepreneurship in the wild west into the financial system,” he said. ICE was “probably late” to making moves like these, he added, but the current Trump administration has allowed a more open dialogue to occur between those in conventional finance and their regulators. 

In other news

Who’s a Better Writer: A.I. or Humans? Take Our Quiz., The New York Times

This story/test depressed the hell out of me. The Times put together “five pairs of writing samples, representing a range of styles and genres” to see if you, the reader, prefer the work of famous writers better than something written by AI.

Of the five questions, I picked three that were written by humans (Qs 1, 2, and 5). Now, there are no right answers here…it’s simply a matter of preference: “Choose the passage you like best, regardless of how it may have been written,” is totally subjective. But if I’m being honest…I liked all 10 passages, and except for Q1, I didn’t have a strong sense of which passages were written by who. 

This might be hubris, but I think reporting will be safe from the bots for a long time. It may seem simple, but getting knowledgeable sources to speak with you and trust you is very human. But fiction (and opinion writing, for that matter)? Well, again, I couldn’t tell the difference.

Now my BFF and colleague, Reb Natale, will lie to me after she’s done editing this Waters Cooler and say that she went 5-for-5, and could EASILY see the difference between human and AI. (Sure, Reb…sure.) But let’s see if you, dear reader, can tell the difference. Feel free to share your results with me: anthony.malakian@infopro-digital.com.