LLM firms come for finance, BMLL gets bought, LSEG users get Preqin feeds, and more

Black cats and golden leaves, 
Glowing lanterns, and wicked deeds. 

Thin as a razor, the veil will be; 
The witching hour dawns, as the clock strikes three.

Happy Halloween, from my house to yours.

Announced this week

Nordic Capital to acquire BMLL for $250 million

Private equity investor Nordic Capital has agreed to acquire BMLL, a provider of historical order book data and analytics, for $250 million.

The investment will be made in close partnership with the management team of BMLL and Optiver, a minority shareholder and market-maker.

BMLL intends to use this investment to further expand global venue coverage, extend historical depth, and grow multi-asset class capabilities, giving the market a differentiated alternative to the incumbent market data providers. With Nordic Capital’s support, BMLL will seek to strengthen its go-to-market capabilities and partnerships with exchanges, technology platforms, and market infrastructure providers. The existing management team, led by CEO Paul Humphrey, will continue leading the business and remain shareholders.

LSEG, Anthropic partner on financial data for enterprise Claude users

The London Stock Exchange Group has partnered with Anthropic to grant access to data licensed through LSEG products, like Workspace and Financial Analytics, to Claude customers. This will be available through Anthropic’s newly expanded Claude for Financial Services offering.

LSEG is giving access to data licensed through its products like Workspace and Financial Analytics so customers can automate financial analysis. LSEG’s AI-ready content will be accessible through Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) in a phased rollout, starting with LSEG Financial Analytics. LSEG will also grant Claude users access to more licensed AI-ready content, with initial capabilities launching later this month and additional data categories to follow.

Through this collaboration, LSEG and Anthropic are also embedding mutual lead generation processes. Claude for Financial Services customers can augment their existing data with licenses for LSEG’s flagship Workspace solution. LSEG is partnering with Workspace customers to secure licensed enterprise access to Claude.

Ion’s Fidessa integrates with LSE Pisces

Ion, a provider of fixed-income and derivatives trading software, announced that its Fidessa platform will support auction events on the London Stock Exchange’s Private Securities Market.

Operating under the Private Intermittent Securities and Capital Exchange System (Pisces) framework, the new secondary market will provide private companies and their shareholders with access to intermittent liquidity auctions leveraging the London Stock Exchange’s public markets infrastructure. Transactions on the platform will be exempt from stamp duty, reducing costs and simplifying the trading process.

IBM debuts Digital Asset Haven for institutions and regulated entities

IBM has launched IBM Digital Asset Haven, a platform for financial institutions, governments, and corporations to securely manage and scale their digital asset operations. Banks and governments now have a single solution to manage their digital asset lifecycle—from custody to transactions to settlement—that helps them meet compliance obligations while being integration-ready.

Developed in collaboration with DFNS, a digital wallet infrastructure provider, IBM Digital Asset Haven integrates the full-stack infrastructure and security of IBM with DFNS digital asset custody and management capabilities. The DFNS platform has created 15 million wallets for more than 250 clients.

Third Bridge integrates data with Anthropic’s Claude for Financial Services

Research provider Third Bridge, in collaboration with Aiera, has integrated with Anthropic’s Claude for Financial Services solution. The partnership incorporates Third Bridge’s corpus of proprietary interview transcripts, making these insights immediately available within Claude.

The integration leverages Aiera’s Model Context Protocol server to incorporate Third Bridge’s qualitative data into Claude’s agentic AI research capabilities. Third Bridge’s insights can be incorporated alongside market data, internal systems, and proprietary models.

Tradeweb advances swaptions electronification via new protocol

Tradeweb Markets has completed the first fully electronic request-for-market (RFM) swaption package trade. Citadel and Barclays were counterparties on the trade, which was executed recently on the Tradeweb Swap Execution Facility (TW SEF).

The execution of this trade enables institutional clients on TW SEF to request and receive a two-way market, rather than a price based on one direction, for a series of swaptions and swaps in a single electronic quote. This is especially beneficial for derivatives market participants, as it enhances transparency while simultaneously protecting client intent, and shares potentially sensitive or strategically valuable trading information exclusively between counterparties.

SS&C introduces AI agent catalogue

SS&C Technologies has launched its AI agent catalogue for financial services and healthcare firms. The outcome-focused AI agents are designed to simplify complex operations such as credit processing and contract validation. Delivered as a managed service, the agents help organizations overcome talent shortages and operational bottlenecks securely and at-scale.

One of the first customers to evaluate an SS&C AI Agent is American Life, a carrier in the annuity and retirement space based in Lincoln, Nebraska. The firm is leveraging and evaluating SS&C’s Credit Agreement Document Agent to streamline processing within its private credit operations. The AI agent continuously reviews and updates lengthy loan documents, cutting time and errors associated with manual review. SS&C saw a significant reduction in credit processing times within internal operations by using the technology.

Eventus, Treliant collaborate for enhanced trade surveillance

Eventus, a provider of trade surveillance and financial risk solutions, is collaborating with Treliant, a global consulting and managed services firm recently acquired by Huron Consulting Group. The relationship between Eventus and Huron will deliver enhanced trade surveillance capabilities for global financial institutions.

The collaboration provides specialized support for Eventus clients leveraging its Validus surveillance platform. While Eventus provides platform delivery, technology support, and surveillance expertise, Treliant enhances the ecosystem by enabling clients to optimize and govern their surveillance environments. Under this collaboration, Eventus clients can engage directly with Treliant to strengthen their surveillance frameworks by conducting risk assessments, tuning alert logic, receiving best practice guidance, and getting managed-service support.

BlackRock enhances LSEG private markets offering with Preqin datafeeds

London Stock Exchange Group has expanded its partnership with BlackRock, strengthening LSEG’s private markets intelligence offering. Through a new advanced data integration, LSEG’s customers will gain deeper insights into private markets and alternative assets by accessing Preqin data through LSEG’s Workspace platform, data, and feeds products. The addition of private markets data enhances LSEG’s data across public and private markets and brings Preqin’s private markets data to a new category of investors.

In parallel, LSEG and BlackRock have also deepened their data integrations in two other areas. LSEG has renewed its multi-year partnership with BlackRock’s Aladdin platform, bringing platform access to LSEG’s pricing and reference services data to power their investment decisions. BlackRock has also extended its partnership with FTSE Russell, enabling BlackRock to continue to license the trusted index provider’s benchmarks to create a variety of investment vehicles for its clients.

What you might have missed from us

Experts urge banks to prep for quantum’s reckoning

Some industry experts and mathematicians peg Q-Day, the day that a large-enough and stable-enough quantum computer is able to break modern encryption methods, as only five years away. In this story, execs from Symphony, Protiviti, and cyber firm Lastwall urge banks to start preparing yesterday and stop kicking the can down the road. If they don’t, all their precious, regulated secrets may become public domain.

SIX, ViaNexus build market data platform to unite data consumers, producers

European exchange operator SIX Group and ViaNexus, the new iteration of what was formerly IEX Cloud, are teaming up to build a market data distribution platform that, if successful, will give SIX more command over its data products and users some freedom from convoluted and restrictive licensing structures.

The platform, projected to be released next year, will function as a data marketplace, with users able to purchase datasets by the slice and be immediately entitled to use it.

The spirit of the project is encapsulated by a number of feel-good words: access, ease, agility, democratization. But make no mistake: it’s also, centrally, about control.

TMX’s CEO wonders if tokenization is a ‘solution looking for a problem’

If it exists, make it a token. Tokenization has been a hot topic—rivaling that of artificial intelligence—in this year’s spate of Q3 earnings calls. But the CEO of Canadian exchange group TMX, John McKenzie, seemed to offer a somewhat contrarian perspective on his firm’s quarterly call with shareholders.

Despite having initiated several pilot programs, McKenzie says the technology has appeared to be a “solution looking for a problem,” a sentiment not dissimilar to that which was said after the blockchain mania seen a few years ago.

“Our marketplaces are prepared, but the use case is still a question mark in terms of the value add,” he said.

MSCI CEO: Vendor ‘feverishly’ infusing ‘every aspect’ of MSCI with AI

During its Q3 earnings call, CEO Henry Fernandez said that since the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT three years ago, MSCI has “feverishly” been “looking into and permeating every aspect of MSCI with AI.”

MSCI has spent the last nine months working on tools that can help investors understand the ins and outs of their funds, focusing on creditworthiness, market risk, valuations, and terms and conditions of underlying loans. It will next look to develop evaluated prices in private credit.

Much of this work is underpinned by AI, which Fernandez called “a godsend.”

Row breaks out over cause of FX settlement fails

An unnamed European bank is claiming to have seen a 50% increase in the rate and size of foreign exchange settlement fails over the past year, which it blames on the move to T+1 settlement in North America on May 28, 2024. But reps for industry groups GFMA and the UK’s T+1 Taskforce, as well as post-trade utility Osttra, are scratching their heads, having found that almost all their members have not reported anything similar.

That’s not to say that no firms have experienced settlement problems, but there are other culprits to consider: rising volatility, market stress, and a greater need for precision, especially for those in certain time zones, like the US West Coast and Asia Pacific.

DTCC revamps tech abilities following global reporting overhaul

The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation’s Repository & Derivatives Services (RDS) is leveraging new forms of technology to upgrade the process of trade reporting and its clients’ workflows. Michelle Hillery, managing director and head of RDS, sat down with WatersTechnology to detail the clearing house’s early testing simulator, global standardization of critical data elements, and its new use of natural-language interfaces for error investigation and correction.

In other news

OpenAI looks to replace the drudgery of junior bankers’ workloads, Bloomberg News

Those who were here in 2022 may remember when our editor, Tony, in a Waters Wrap, warned fintechs that Big Tech firms were coming for their toys. The first domino fell in November 2021, when Google invested $1 billion into Chicago derivatives exchange group CME, which promised to migrate its entire tech stack to Google Cloud. Nasdaq went next, announcing a near-replica deal with Amazon Web Services that same month. The dominoes never really stopped falling.

Well, it’s happening again. But this time, the next generation of Big Tech—that is, the large language model (LLM) providers—is coming for this industry.

In this column alone, Anthropic, which released Claude for Financial Services in July, gets its paws on LSEG and Third Bridge. And in the Bloomberg story linked above, you’ll find that OpenAI, the father of ChatGPT, has hired 100 ex-investment bankers to train its AI to build financial models as part of a secretive project, code-named Mercury.

Mercury participants include former employees of Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and Morgan Stanley, and the project involves almost no human interaction. Instead, these contributors are paid $150/hour to write prompts and build financial models for a range of transaction types. OpenAI has also granted the contractors early access to the AI it’s creating, which aims to replace entry-level tasks at investment banks.

Seems quite grim, but also a little funny. This is the second time in less than five years that the industry that somehow believes itself to be a thriving and cutting-edge tech sector is getting got by the actual tech sector, while pretending to be best friends. Will sanity ever prevail?

The mild-mannered Englishman who was the world’s most prolific ghost hunter, LitHub

A Halloween Cooler wouldn’t be complete without a ghost story—my favorite kind of story. In this excerpt from Ben Machell’s “Chasing the Dark: A 140-Year Investigation of Paranormal Activity,” Machell details some of the unexplainable cases investigated by Tony Cornell, a skeptical Cambridge man who studied telepathy, paranormal activity, and other areas of psychic research in the latter half of the 20th century.

Ghost stories are found all over the world, in different flavors but with remarkably similar textures. They are a thread that runs through all stripes of geographies, religions, ethnicities, and time periods, and they reveal to us our anxieties and hopes. In fact, my hometown, a small dot in upstate New York, has its own White Lady, a common figure in folklore that usually appears as a woman in a long, white, flowing gown. We call her Widow Susan.

I believe in ghosts, literally and figuratively. After all, what is a memory, if not a ghost?