New Preqin indices, Bloomberg’s TCA API, and more

Mercury is retrograde in Cancer, which is why you feel like that. Could also be the heat. Good luck.

What you might have missed this week

Broadridge delivers new reconciliation platform to Raiffeisen Bank International

Broadridge Financial Solutions announced that Centralised Raiffeisen International Services & Payments (CRISP), the shared service center for Raiffeisen Bank International, has upgraded to Broadridge’s new reconciliation platform, BRx Match.

The BRx Match platform’s cloud-based architecture delivers automation, exception management, and integration with ISO 20022 messaging standards. It will support CRISP’s operations across a total of 14 markets including the DACH region, Central and Eastern Europe and Asia, representing both new implementations and migrations from previous Broadridge reconciliation solutions.

BlackRock Aladdin expands Preqin benchmarks and indices

BlackRock Aladdin has expanded its Preqin benchmarks and indices solutions to give investors access to both reporting-grade indices and customizable peer benchmarks in one place, helping to create a common performance measurement standard for private markets. The solution supports a broad range of private markets benchmarking needs, from peer comparison and manager evaluation to policy benchmarking and investment reporting.

Covering closed-end fund-level indices powered by comprehensive LP-sourced daily cash flow data, asset-level indices and more than 140,000 peer benchmarks, the solution enables investors to compare performance across private markets with greater consistency, transparency, and granularity. The newly enhanced closed-end indices cover more than 10,000 funds, representing more than $13 trillion.

FTSE Russell and Stock Exchange of Thailand launch new index

FTSE Russell, LSEG’s global index provider, and the Stock Exchange of Thailand have launched the FTSE4Good Thailand Index, focused on investable securities in Thailand’s equity market demonstrating robust environmental, social and governance (ESG) standards.

Derived from the FTSE SET All-Share Index comprising constituents from the FTSE SET large, mid and small cap indices, it applies a transparent, rules-based methodology incorporating exclusionary screening and ESG score thresholds. This supports inclusion of companies meeting globally recognized ESG criteria, aligned with the FTSE4Good Index Series.

Bloomberg launches pre-trade TCA API

Bloomberg has launched its multi-asset pre-trade transaction cost analysis (TCA) API, allowing clients to bring pre-trade and in-trade execution intelligence and analytics directly into their proprietary fixed-income and equities trading and investment workflows. Firms can programmatically access Bloomberg’s pre-trade transaction cost analytics at scale through the API, making execution insights available across a broader range of trading decisions and order flow.

S&P Global Market Intelligence evolves operating model to accelerate agentic solutions

S&P Global announced a new operating model for its Market Intelligence unit. This evolution is designed to better align the business with changing customer needs and to position the company for growth in an AI-driven market.

S&P Global Market Intelligence will be organized into two verticals with distinct but complementary areas, Kensho Data & Platforms and Enterprise Solutions. Together, these verticals bring S&P Global Market Intelligence data, AI, software and workflow capabilities into strong alignment with quickly evolving customer needs.

For more details on executive leadership and coverage areas, click here.

CFETS, HKMA to develop trading platform in Hong Kong

The China Foreign Exchange Trade System (CFETS) and Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Limited (HKEX) are to develop an electronic fixed-income and currency (FIC) trading platform in Hong Kong. This initiative will strengthen the financial cooperation between Hong Kong and the Chinese Mainland, and reinforce Hong Kong’s position as an international financial center and an offshore RMB business hub.

The People’s Bank of China, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, and the Securities and Futures Commission, have jointly welcomed the collaboration. Further details of the FIC trading platform, including the launch timeline, will be announced in due course.

CryptoStruct integrates Kalshi to power ultra-low-latency access to prediction markets

CryptoStruct, a provider of low-latency trading and market data solutions, announced a new connectivity integration with Kalshi, the first CFTC-regulated event-trading exchange in the US.

The integration brings Kalshi’s rapidly expanding suite of event contracts—spanning macroeconomics, politics, commodities, sports, and real-world outcomes—directly into CryptoStruct’s unified API and co-located global infrastructure. Because Kalshi is normalized into the same format as every other venue CryptoStruct supports, firms can blend it with their existing feeds and run cross-venue strategies without extra integration work.

What you might have missed from us

Finance firms join Anthropic’s Project Glasswing as AI transforms cyber risk

AI is leaving no stone unturned in its takeover of everyday life. And in cybersecurity, the threat is especially pressing. In response, Anthropic has created Project Glasswing, an initiative bringing together Big Tech companies and now banks and financial services firms, in an effort to “secure the world’s most critical software.” Though its unclear exactly which firms are participating in Glasswing, which comes with access to Anthropic’s powerful Mythos model, Broadridge and the Intercontinental Exchange are two names that will be familiar to our readers.

The first overnight trading puzzle pieces fall into place

In the latest Waters Wrap, Nyela writes that there are some considerations for firms hoping to capitalize on fully operational overnight trading later this year. The DTCC and its subsidiary, the NSCC, have made critical preparations, but the equity data plans and, of course, the exchanges have work to do if they’re to achieve the lofty goal of “always-on” markets.

MUFG builds internally compliant version of Claude Code

Japanese bank MUFG developed its own version of a popular copilot from Anthropic, Claud Code, after Anthropic’s version kept circumventing the bank’s security and compliance guidelines. Enter AIQ Code, MUFG’s bespoke copy of Claude Code for internal use. It produces MUFG‑grade code, runtime support, documentation and version control, and runs server‑side on bank‑owned infrastructure.

Winning M&A depends on a strong data and technology strategy

Fenergo’s Tracy Moore writes in this guest column that as buy-side M&A activity is expected to rise, firms need to prioritize technological readiness and harmony to get the most bang for their buck and avoid amplifying existing gaps.

Experts forecast more than 1,500 significant M&As by 2029 among firms managing at least $1 billion in assets, which could reduce the total number of firms by 20%. “This surge in activity signals a shift toward a more consolidated, competitive landscape, where firms will need to execute successfully or risk falling behind,” she writes.

Agentic AI for XVAs still five years away, experts say

Agentic AI could transform XVA pricing and scenario creation, but several barriers mean it could be up to five years before the technology is in full use, said financial experts speaking at Risk Live last week.

Andy Lyon, global head of XVA market risk at Citi, said the bank had a handful of incubator projects in AI for XVAs, but nothing production-ready that could replace existing processes. Competing priorities, including implementing the Fundamental Review of the Trading Book and internal overhauls of data and risk processes, have pushed AI XVA work backwards in the queue, he said.

In other news

The End of Reading Is Here, The Atlantic

If any of you have ever followed me on Twitter X, I often used to wonder into that internet void why every new baby name was some variation of Tragedeigh—that is, misspelled, performatively unique, or otherwise tragic in a vague, unsettling sense. I know now that it had to do with a literacy crisis that could be described as “budding” for a long time but now seems to be in full bloom.

Rose Horowitch of The Atlantic has given us several thousand words on topic (please, for the love of God, read them, or at least sound them out), reporting on the possibility that universal literacy, once presumed to be inevitable, may actually be a blip in the long saga of human history.

“[S]trangely Americans are probably reading more words than ever before. What has changed is what they read, and how. People are bombarded with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions. This explosion of textual fragments has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information. Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn’t mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. America, in other words, isn’t illiterate. It’s postliterate,” she writes.

I tend toward cynicism, but let me try the opposite for once with a quote from one of my favorite books: “You can’t make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can’t last.” If you don’t know where it’s from, I suggest you search for it. Happy hunting.