FactSet and JP Morgan’s new tool, Broadridge’s proxy voting play, Fitch’s new MCP, and more

April is over, and with it goes the most terrifying four weeks of every Arsenal fan’s life. Our historically worst month has left us in the final four of the Champions League and with a three-point lead in the Premier League over Manchester City. My nails are chewed to the bone, thinking about upcoming fixtures gives me the shakes, and my mental health for the year once again rests on the shoulders of 11 overpaid men in red and white.

It’s a perfect time to think about literally anything else, especially tech and data in the capital markets…

Announced this week

ExtractAlpha relaunches AlphaClub research workspace  

ExtractAlpha has relaunched AlphaClub, its research workspace designed to help investment professionals use ExtractAlpha’s datasets, signals, and research capabilities.

The updated AlphaClub introduces a redesigned interface, expanded data coverage, international signals, and more insights. 

The workspace serves as a centralized environment where users can explore ExtractAlpha’s offerings, understand how stock selection signals are constructed, and assess where they may be relevant within an existing investment process.

Ondo Finance and Broadridge bring shareholder voting capabilities to tokenized securities 

Ondo Finance, a blockchain platform for tokenizing real-world assets, has partnered with Broadridge to enable holders of third-party tokenized stocks and exchange-traded funds to participate in proxy voting.

Through integrating with a Web3-enabled solution developed by Broadridge, holders of more than 250 Ondo tokenized stocks and ETFs will also be able to review prospectuses, regulatory filings, and other governance information for underlying securities, leveraging Broadridge’s investor communications and proxy infrastructure.

The new capability enables public companies and funds, broker-dealers and wealth managers, and retail and institutional investors to access proxy voting and manage corporate actions and disclosures across both traditional and tokenized securities within their existing platforms and workflows. Broadridge has integrated Web3 authentication capabilities into its ProxyVote platform to allow investors to sign in through their wallets. 

FactSet and JP Morgan expand partnership with portfolio tool 

FactSet and JP Morgan expanded their collaboration with the launch of the Whole Portfolio Distribution solution, available through FactSet and powered by JP Morgan’s Fusion. Whole Portfolio Distribution is a fully managed analytics and reporting solution that lets investors view their portfolio without having to use several manual processes. 

Investment data from JP Morgan Fund Accounting services is transformed and normalized via Fusion and delivered securely to FactSet, where clients benefit from faster time-to-report, automated portfolio analytics, and the ability to respond rapidly to opportunities while reducing operational burden and risk.

Trumid builds out AI suite with Smart Voice and Smart Swap 

Fixed income electronic trading platform Trumid has launched Trumid Smart Voice, an AI-powered tool that lets users convert unstructured conversations into pre-filled trade tickets, automatically extracting key details to support accurate booking and processing. By combining automation with human oversight, it is designed to eliminate manual re-entry and error risk, accelerate time to execution, and streamline trade booking.

Smart Voice supports sell-side traders and salespeople and buy-side clients by enhancing collaboration across participants. The firm has also introduced Trumid Smart Swap, extending similar functionality to swap trades. Since launch, Smart Voice and Smart Swap have processed more than $56 billion in traded volume, eliminating an estimated 77,000 manual clicks.

FIS launches new digital money platform for banks  

FIS has announced Lyriq, a platform that enables banks to issue, manage, and settle their own digital money, including tokenized deposits and digital currencies, while keeping those deposits on bank balance sheets. 

The platform is designed for regulated financial institutions and was built from the ground up to meet bank and regulatory standards, with embedded compliance, identity verification, and audit controls.

Lyriq works with existing core banking systems, regardless of technology provider, and supports 24/7 settlement with transactions that either complete fully or fail cleanly, eliminating partial failures and reconciliation headaches.

Lyriq’s initial focus is on enabling domestic tokenized deposits and international financial institutions for digital euro services and integrations for CBDC programs in EMEA and APAC with ISO 20022 support for global digital money initiatives.

Fitch Solutions launches Fitch Nexus MCP to speed up credit insights 

Analytics provider Fitch Solutions has launched Fitch Nexus, a Model Context Protocol (MCP) connector that allows clients to quickly access Fitch Ratings’ credit insights directly through their own internal AI applications and large language models via a single, governed interface designed for enterprise and regulated environments.

The company says that insights from Fitch Solutions’ CreditSights will be available soon, with additional capabilities from BMI and Sustainable Fitch to follow in the coming months.

DTCC and SSImple partner to automate standing settlement instructions for custodians 

The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) is collaborating with SSImple to help custodians seamlessly automate the submission of validated, accurate and complete standing settlement instructions (SSIs) into DTCC’s Alert, the world’s largest SSI database.

The Financial Markets Standards Board’s (FMSB’s) Core Principle 1 calls for the automation of SSIs as a key step in reducing settlement risk, as a significant number of trade fails are a direct result of inaccurate or incomplete SSIs. 

This collaboration brings together DTCC’s Alert and SSImple’s SSI Comply to strengthen data governance and reduce settlement risk while aligning with the FMSB’s recommendation to automate SSI transmission by the end of 2026. 

What you might have missed from us

Quants like Andrew Ang are making the case for AI agents

Andrew Ang, a Columbia University adjunct professor and the former BlackRock factor investing head, says that agentic AI is a huge boon for quant teams. He and researchers from AltBridge, an AI-native hedge fund start-up where Ang is an adviser, authored a paper in which they wrote that an agentic investment process can be “broader, deeper, and faster” than a human team alone could achieve.

However, the deployment of these agents themselves presents challenges. “The obvious risk is that the agents are stupid and they fail,” Ang says. 

What firms get wrong when changing investment operations technology

In this guest article from Patrick Conroy, vice president at STP Investment Services, he says that when firms change technology solutions in pursuit of modernization, they often neglect operating redesign, governance, and accountability. Whatever follows is not rooted in the decision to change technology platforms, but from a failure to move all the firm’s services in tandem with each other.

Waters Wavelength Ep. 351: MarketAxess’s Lee and Alexandre

This week, Wei-Shen talks to MarketAxess’s Spencer Lee and Julien Alexandre to discuss AI and its use cases in the complex world of fixed-income data. In other news, Tony talks about the NFL Draft. 

24X says requested SIP exemption won’t break the market

24X National Exchange has filed a new letter to the SEC in its pursuit to offer overnight trading. General counsel David Sassoon writes that delays by the Equity Data Plans and the availability of alternative consolidated feeds justify short-term relief, and 24X would launch its 24X Market Session in July if approved. Critics, including Nasdaq and other market participants, warn the exemption could fragment markets, weaken transparency and should be done through formal Exchange Act rulemaking.

Capital markets’ demand for Google’s chips buoys cloud business

Google’s enterprise AI solutions have become the primary growth driver for the tech giant’s cloud business, with Google Cloud revenues exceeding $20 billion for the first time in Q1. 

Company executives attribute much of this performance to demand for Google’s tensor processing units (TPUs), developed for neural network machine learning and now in their eighth generation. “We’ll begin to deliver TPUs to a select group of customers in their own datacenters in a hardware configuration to expand our addressable market opportunity,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said.

Pimco replaces Bloomberg EMS with TS Imagine

Pacific Investment Management Company, better known as Pimco, is in the process of switching to TS Imagine’s TradeSmart execution management system and away from one of its current Bloomberg offerings, multiple sources tell WatersTechnology.

Investment firms changing EMSs is nothing new, but Pimco’s size makes the move notable. The asset manager oversees $2.2 trillion in assets, making it one of the 10 largest asset managers in the world. While some sources pointed to cost reduction as a reason for the switch, others said it was their understanding that the firm is looking to diversify its suite of solutions.

In other news

Berkshire Has a Website From the ’90s and Buffett Fans Say Don’t Mess With It,  The Wall Street Journal 

One part of journalism that flies under the radar is how many websites we open on a daily basis. There’s a high chance that whatever company you work for, I have opened your website while searching for a press release or media contact and have at least made note of how striking or maybe how generic it is on my brief sojourn there. Since the dot-com boom of the early 2000s, website accessibility and experience has become far more important for clients, analysts, partners, and anyone else hoping to interact with the site’s owner.

So when a website is bad, it’s noticeable. Berkshire Hathaway’s website is bad. 

The homepage has sixteen links to company materials but is otherwise just text on a white background. It has not meaningfully changed in format since 1996 and therefore has no mobile version. Fans of the website, as well as those of Berkshire Hathaway’s mythos of rejecting fancy ornamentation, say that they plan to reject any plans to drag the site into the 21st century, with one analyst saying that if an update does take place, they would sell their shares in the company. 

Seriously, check out the website. Is it charming and nostalgic, or an eyesore that needs an update? Give me your take at eliot.ramanjones@infopro-digital.com