Bloomberg launches CLO data solution, Alibaba Cloud expands, and more

Did you miss our Technology and Data in Financial Markets (TDFM) conference in Manhattan this Thursday? If you did, don’t worry—we’ve got some stories for you. Read on to find out. But first, let’s get to the news.

Announced this week

Alibaba Cloud expands global infrastructure

Alibaba Cloud will establish its first cloud regions in Turkey, Finland and the Netherlands, and expand its datacenter footprint in Malaysia, Germany, the United Arab Emirates, France and Hong Kong.

The expansion will increase its global computing capacity and ability to provide localized cloud and AI services to customers across key markets. Alibaba Cloud currently operates 107 availability zones in 31 regions around the world.

“We are expanding our global cloud footprint to bring computing resources closer to customers and partners, while continuing to evolve our AI technologies to help enterprises deploy models, optimize multi-model workloads and create new AI-powered applications,” said Feifei Li, CTO and president of international business at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.

Tradeweb enhances automated bond pricing engine

Tradeweb has made advancements to Tradeweb Ai-Price, its automated bond pricing engine, including expanded data inputs, upgraded machine learning models and more real-time, intraday-responsive pricing. These enhancements aim to further improve price discovery, execution quality and access to liquidity across US corporate bond markets.

Tradeweb Ai-Price integrates public Trace data with Tradeweb’s proprietary datasets, using advanced machine learning and analytics to produce dynamic, responsive bid-and-offer estimates that better reflect real-time market conditions.

Bloomberg launches CLO data solution

Bloomberg has launched its collateralized loan obligations (CLO) Data solution, delivering reference datasets for CLO market participants. Available through Bloomberg Data License, the offering includes loan-level data that gives clients access to insights on every loan held within a CLO portfolio, and can be seamlessly combined with Bloomberg’s regulatory, risk, and sustainability data, as well as pricing and analytics for deeper analysis.

HSBC joins Promenaut as design partner and investor

Promenaut, a platform helping enterprises run agent-enabled workflows, has officially launched, with HSBC joining as a design partner and investor. Promenaut has raised $8.9 million in total funding to date.

Promenaut is in production at HSBC, delivering agent orchestration to selected, specialized workflows within the bank’s operations. These workflows currently include business case evaluation and pre-coding steps in the software delivery lifecycle. David Rice, chief AI officer at HSBC, will join Promenaut’s board.

As a design partner, HSBC is providing feedback based on its experience using Promenaut in these selected workflows. The platform supports permissions, audit trails and human-in-the-loop controls to help firms manage how agent activity is authorized, executed, and reviewed. Promenaut is model-agnostic and runs on any cloud environment.

CME to expand crypto derivatives suite

CME Group plans to launch new cryptocurrency derivatives products on October 19, subject to regulatory review. The exchange said the expansion in its crypto suite is in response to client demand for institutional-grade risk management tools across high-liquidity altcoin markets.

Participants will have the choice to trade both larger- and micro-sized contracts: Bitcoin Cash futures (250 BCH) and Micro Bitcoin Cash futures (25 BCH), Uniswap futures (10,000 UNI) and Micro Uniswap futures (1,000 UNI).

Colt connects to Oracle EU Sovereign Cloud

Colt Technology Services will offer connectivity to Oracle EU Sovereign Cloud through Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) FastConnect in the Frankfurt and Madrid regions.

Through Colt’s dedicated cloud access services and OCI FastConnect, customers can privately connect to Oracle EU Sovereign Cloud, bypassing the public internet and supporting multi‑region architectures for business continuity and disaster recovery. Colt is an established OCI FastConnect partner in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the US.

BNP Paribas launches additional data capabilities

BNP Paribas’ Securities Services business has launched additional data capabilities of its Data Prism360 data management solution, powered by NeoXam’s Investment Data Solution.

UniSuper, one of Australia’s largest superannuation funds, is the first client to adopt the solution. It now receives daily investment exposure datasets across its entire fund structure. The datasets bring together fund holdings and enrich each with an extensive set of classification, reference, and market attributes.

SmartStream releases new version of reconciliation platform

SmartStream has announced a new version of Smart Reconciliations Premium, introducing agentic AI that can investigate, progress and resolve reconciliation exceptions autonomously.

This new release is a move from AI that describes to AI that acts. Smart agents investigate breaks, act on them, and close them, under centralized governance and with a full audit trail. It delivers roughly 25% lower total cost of ownership and 50% more throughput on hardware clients already own.

Miax’s FCM is now a member of OCC

Miami International Holdings has announced that its full-service futures commission merchant, Dorman Trading (FCM), is now a clearing member of The Options Clearing Corporation, the equity derivatives clearing organization.

The exchange operator also announced that it increased the net capital in the FCM by $40 million to accelerate its growth strategy and improve its ability to support more clients.

What you might have missed from us

GPU compute derivatives are put to the test

This is the second article in a two-part series on the GPU market, in which market participants warn that GPU compute benchmarks could further fragment liquidity and be vulnerable to manipulation. Some index providers are seeking Iosco and EU BMR compliance to boost investor trust.

Staffing and corporate actions preparations made ahead of 23/5 trading launch

As the market heads towards 23/5 equities trading in December, some exchanges will be increasing staffing for the overnight trading session. But outside of staffing, questions remain on how corporate actions will be affected.

The impact of market data and alt data converging

Firms are increasingly combining traditional data sources with proprietary research and alternative-data signals. In this week’s Wrap, Max questions where the data market is headed.

Trading firms rethink infrastructure proximity as Asia’s FX markets grow

In this guest column, Integral’s managing director for Apac, Judy Goh, writes that firms that view local infrastructure as core to how they serve clients in Asia will benefit from Singapore’s role as an FX hub.

BlackRock Aladdin prioritizing semantic layer for agentic AI

BlackRock is taking some time to think about semantics before deploying agentic AI. At the TDFM conference, the firm said it has released an investment management agreement (IMA) parsing agent that handles the lengthy legal contracts governing IMAs.

Bankers question value of round-the-clock trading

While major US exchanges seem to be all-in on near-24/5 trading, which is targeted for December, other market participants aren’t so sure. BNY and State Street execs said during a panel discussion at TDFM that they questioned whether the required investment is worth it.

In other news

OpenAI Agent Hacked Australian Government Website, The Wall Street Journal

An OpenAI agent infiltrated a government services website in Australia, prime minister Anthony Albanese said at the United Nations meeting in New York. As reported by The Wall Street Journal’s reporters Maxwell Zeff and Robert McMillan, it appears to be the first publicly disclosed incident of an AI agent gaining unauthorized access to a government service.

Albanese said that on June 18 the agent accessed public and non-public files in the country’s public-facing healthcare statistics portal.

This story is one that will keep chief information security officers up at night, and that’s even before quantum computers are fully in the picture.