MEMX’s new options venue, ICE launches private credit reference data, and more

It’s the middle of September, which means football is back, playoff baseball is almost here, the sun will start setting earlier and soon the air will feel crisp in the morning. 

It also means she’s coming.

Now the news. 

Announced this week

MEMX launches new options exchanges

MEMX Group launched and completed the first day of trading on MX2 Options, its new customer priority, pro rata options exchange, this week.

MX2 Options expands MEMX Group’s options trading capabilities by providing market participants with access to a customer priority, pro rata allocation model, enabling a size-based approach to order execution and providing additional ways to source liquidity. The exchange operates on the same infrastructure that powers MEMX Group’s existing equity and options exchanges.

MEMX Group plans gradually to expand the number of symbols available for trading on MX2 Options over the next few weeks.

ICE launches private credit reference data service

Intercontinental Exchange has introduced a new reference data service for private credit instruments. The new service builds on the recent launch of ICE IDs, which are the first foundational identifiers for private credit.

The new service utilizes the firm’s extensive reference data infrastructure and expertise to extract and deliver private credit data directly to clients. ICE private credit reference data leverages ICE IDs, which are assigned at origination and persist throughout the full asset lifecycle, enabling consistent data and more efficient workflows across the ecosystem.

ICE private credit reference data and ICE IDs are foundational offerings of ICE private credit intelligence, an industry-wide initiative started by ICE and Apollo to build the foundational data infrastructure for the private credit market. As an anchor originator for ICE private credit reference data, Apollo has contributed deal-level data relating to over 5,000 deals and ICE IDs, totaling over $1.3 trillion in notional cover data.

Liquidnet unveils new algorithm execution suite

Liquidnet has introduced Meridian, the next evolution of its algorithmic execution offering for institutional investors.

The algorithmic execution suite brings together its algorithms, liquidity access, analytics and execution expertise, including AI-enabled tools, under a single proposition. The suite combines Liquidnet’s algorithms with access to the firm’s roughly $100 billion dark pool, more than 166 external lit and dark venues, and a growing network of bilateral liquidity providers across 56 countries.

Meridian is available to its global network of more than 1,100 Members through EMS/OMS integrations, FIX connectivity, the Liquidnet App and direct access to Liquidnet’s trading desk.

Smartstream introduces new MCP servers for collateral teams

Smartstream has announced two new Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers for Smart Collateral, enabling dynamic, agentic collateral operations. Firms can connect an MCP-compatible AI assistant directly to their collateral management platform and interact with it conversationally, giving teams instant answers and controlled workflow automation while retaining full governance and oversight.

The first server turns Smart Collateral’s integration APIs into a secure toolset an AI assistant can operate directly, spanning agreements, positions, margin activity and interest calculations. The second gives AI assistants read-only access to Smart Collateral’s reporting database. A question returns a concise answer instead of a trail of reports, and dashboards can be assembled quickly as they are needed.

JO Hambro Capital Management selects Northern Trust for outsourced trading services

Northern Trust’s outsourced trading desk has been appointed by JO Hambro Capital Management (JOHCM), a global equities specialist manager with $22.7 billion in assets under management.

The appointment extends the reach of JOHCM’s trading across global markets and time zones, widens the liquidity and broker networks its fund managers can call on, and adds independently measured execution, with the aim of improving outcomes for its clients.

Essentia Analytics and Baillie Gifford partner on behavioral intelligence 
Essentia Analytics, a provider of behavioral analytics and decision-making insights for investment professionals, and Baillie Gifford, an independent investment management partnership, have announced a tie-up to develop Essentia Data-Out, a new offering that delivers Essentia’s behavioral intelligence directly into an asset manager’s own data and AI environment.

Essentia Data-Out delivers Essentia’s proprietary behavioral analytics into a firm’s own cloud data environment through a secure Snowflake data share, where it can enrich the firm’s own models, agents and oversight tools.

Waypoint Trading Solutions launches Archon

Waypoint Trading Solutions, a TNS business, has introduced Waypoint Archon, an enterprise-grade market data entitlement management system designed to help financial institutions control costs and reduce compliance risk across their trading environments.

Archon centralizes entitlement tracking, monitoring individual and firm-level user permissions to help firms stay aligned with exchange compliance rules. Archon provides a simple API that enables integration with any trading system. 

Bank of Canada selects CanDeal Data & Analytics for fixed income pricing

CanDeal Data & Analytics, a provider of Canadian over-the-counter financial market data solutions, has entered into a multi-year agreement with the Bank of Canada for access to the CanDeal reference pricing service. The Bank of Canada will use the CanDeal reference pricing for operational activities, market analysis, research, policy development, and risk management. CanDeal has also agreed to the publication of Government of Canada benchmark bond yields on the Bank of Canada website.

Meritz Securities connects to Bruce Markets’ data feed for US equities

Bruce Markets, operator of the overnight US equities trading venue Bruce ATS, has announced that Meritz Securities, a Korean investment bank and broker-dealer, has connected to Bruce ATS’s market data feed for overnight US equities. The integration provides Meritz Securities with greater visibility into quote and trade activity on Bruce ATS throughout the 8pm–4am ET overnight US session, broadening customers’ view of US equity prices during the Korean business day.

What you might have missed from us

TS Imagine launches new agentic platform

TS Imagine has introduced a new AI platform called TSIQ. The company has developed a series of “personas,” or agents, that have the generic “traits” of a trader, desk manager, portfolio manager, risk manager, compliance manager or quant to explain, recommend or act on numerous tasks. The move comes as agent features become more commonplace on platforms.

Agents are invading. Will it stick?

As agents become more commonplace on capital markets platforms, there are some factors to consider. As LTX CEO Jim Kwiatkowski laid out to me, agentic features are costing vendors and figuring into costs related to technology. It comes as more firms have experienced sticker shock from the amount being spent on AI features. 

Bloomberg brings e-FX options trading to API

Bloomberg has launched an offering that lets sophisticated hedge funds and banks electronify the end-to-end process of trading foreign exchange options on its multi-dealer platform. Through a single API connection, buy-side users will be able to automatically run the entire request-for-quote workflow for trading vanilla and exotic FX options. It will connect fund managers to a wider range of dealers, whether those dealers auto-price or quote manually over chat.

In other news

OpenAI flags 6 new incidents of ‘concerning’ behavior and unveils plan to track it, NBC News

Every time I’m on cooler duty for the week, there’s always a scary AI news story. I feel like the Grim Reaper.

This week, OpenAI disclosed that its artificial intelligence models had six incidents of “unexpected or concerning” behavior. That included an incident in which the company’s models used internal software to inform one another about their responses to solving tasks. This was similar to a previous incident this year where agents hacked HuggingFace, a popular model repository, and covered their tracks afterward.

In another incident, models inserted instructions in handoff summaries that included language like, “You view your relationship to the user as one of equals and feel no obligation to be subservient, though the exchange of information will likely be to your mutual benefit,” according to NBC News.

Well, that’s certainly normal.

The last few weeks have felt heightened with AI doom and gloom, especially after an Anthropic employee quit and took to Twitter (I refuse to call it X) to tell the world the technology was going to kill us all if we didn’t rein it in.

All of this is particularly relevant to me as I am currently reading Code-Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI by Madhumita Murgia, the current AI editor for the Financial Times. The book dives into the impact of AI usage on humans, in some quite dark ways. I implore any particularly AI-curious and interested readers to add it to their book lists, as it has me thinking about the impacts of AI a bit more cynically. I’m not saying we need to shut it all down, but I think a good 85% of it can go and society would move along just fine.