Fully electronic IPOs, Google Gemini for finance, and more

The end of August. Just as Noah Kahan predicted.

Announced this week

Google Cloud launches Gemini Enterprise for financial firms

Google Cloud unveiled Gemini Enterprise for Financial Services, an agentic AI solution engineered for financial professionals. This solution includes a Google-managed financial research agent, more than 50 new skills with specialized agentic instructions for financial roles and workflows, enterprise data connectors, and a third-party agent ecosystem.

Initially available in preview for the capital markets and corporate banking industries, Gemini Enterprise for Financial Services is in use by institutions like CME Group and Deutsche Bank, a design partner for the financial research agent.

Marex expands FX and precious metals prime brokerage with new liquidity platform

Marex Group has expanded its prime services capabilities with the launch of a proprietary aggregated liquidity platform. The platform gives hedge funds, asset managers and professional clients access to multi-dealer FX and precious metals liquidity through a single global prime brokerage relationship.

At the core of this offering is an aggregated pricing engine that consolidates live streams from multiple tier-one and specialist liquidity providers into a single executable price, removing the need for clients to establish numerous bilateral relationships. In addition, smart-order-routing-style execution enables anonymous access to multiple liquidity pools to achieve the best available pricing.

RQD Clearing secures $74 million in investment round led by Bain Capital

RQD Clearing, a clearing and custody firm providing access to US markets, announced a $74 million minority growth investment led by Bain Capital Tech Opportunities, with participation from ABN Amro Clearing Bank and Nyca Partners.

The investment will support RQD’s continued expansion across North America, Asia and the Middle East, accelerate investment in its technology and product capabilities including digital assets and tokenization, strengthen its role as a custody infrastructure layer for digital assets, and expand the company’s ability to serve financial institutions seeking access to US markets.

“RQD has demonstrated that its platform can support sophisticated clients at meaningful scale while maintaining the flexibility and responsiveness financial institutions increasingly demand. We look forward to partnering with the team as the company expands its capabilities and global reach,” said Michael Grandfield, partner at Bain Capital Tech Opportunities.

Northern Trust and CSC partner on digital assets

Northern Trust and Commonwealth Superannuation Corporation (CSC), one of Australia’s largest superannuation funds, have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to explore opportunities to advance digital investment infrastructure and support innovation across institutional markets.

The MoU establishes a framework for collaboration focused on emerging technologies including tokenization, digital assets, and enhanced digital cash capabilities. The parties will explore opportunities to improve transparency, operational efficiency, and connectivity throughout institutional investment processes.

The collaboration builds on the successful participation of both organizations in Project Acacia, a joint research initiative led by the Reserve Bank of Australia and the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre focused on understanding how tokenized assets can function within today’s institutional market frameworks.

Clear Street launches electronic execution across Europe and Asia-Pacific

Clear Street, a cloud-native financial infrastructure technology firm, has launched electronic execution in Europe and Asia-Pacific, extending its algorithmic trading offering beyond the US and Canada for the first time. Clients can now execute across 27 new markets through one single connection and see positions and trades in the same real-time ledger that powers Clear Street’s US business.

In EMEA, Clear Street now executes across primary exchanges in 22 markets, alongside dark venues, systematic internalizers, periodic auction books, and ETF liquidity via RFQ. European emerging markets are included from launch, with out-of-hours German venues to follow. In Asia-Pacific, the firm is live across Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, New Zealand and Singapore with South Korea and Taiwan to follow in the coming months.

BGC Group selects IPC One to modernize global trading connectivity

IPC Systems, a provider of secure technology solutions for financial markets, announced that global brokerage BGC Group has chosen IPC One as its strategic communications and connectivity platform. The selection expands the companies’ long-standing relationship and supports BGC’s growth strategy.

Under the agreement, BGC is deploying IPC One capabilities—including One TradeDesk, One View, Soft Client, Mobile Client, One Connect, One Call, and Directory—as a unified platform to streamline connectivity and support global trading operations.

“We wanted a partner who could help reshape how our global business connects and trades,” said Mike Whitaker, COO and CIO at BGC Group. “With IPC One, we’ve replaced complexity with a unified, cloud-enabled platform that empowers our teams to move faster, collaborate more effectively, and stay focused on delivering value to clients.”

Trade associations publish roadmap for equity issuance electronification

In a step toward the first fully electronic IPO, the FIX Trading Community (FIX) and the Investment Association (IA) published an industry best-practice framework to support the modernization of equity capital raising processes. By establishing a standard approach, the framework will help make the equity issuance process fully digital while improving efficiency and transparency, with future work expected to build on these standards across IPO and secondary placements.

The framework addresses one of the few remaining areas of capital markets that continues to rely heavily on manual workflows, with orders in IPOs and secondary share placings often communicated by email, telephone, or chat message.

Developed by buy- and sell-side firms as well as technology providers, the guidance takes a vendor-agnostic and system-agnostic approach, providing a standardized way for investment managers, syndicate banks, and vendor platforms to communicate throughout the capital raising process.

What you might have missed from us

Waters Wavelength Ep. 357: Off topic, on record

Anthony and Wei-Shen hold me hostage for an hour to talk about the movies, TV shows, books, and music we enjoyed this summer. Listen at your own risk.

Reasoning agents enter the onboarding process for banks

Technologists from IBM write that agentic AI is coming to anti-money laundering (AML) and know-your-customer (KYC) processes to replace sequential, siloed checks with orchestrator agents who can make judgment calls and decisions about clients and potential clients.

Navigating the MarketAxess ICE storm

In this week’s Waters Wrap, Max Bowie is back with his thoughts on the recent purchase of MarketAxess by the Intercontinental Exchange. While the mainstreams have been busy talking about front-office benefits to fixed-income desks, he believes a little more attention is warranted on what ICE and MarketAxess may create from their shared market and reference data assets and capabilities.

Report once: Will ESMA’s €1bn reforms deliver the full picture?

Last month, the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) published a final report setting out its vision to simplify the bloc’s raft of regulations. By reducing their reporting burden, it aims to cut firms’ compliance costs and boost profitability. Surely, all reporting entities love this idea. Wrong!

The market’s most valuable asset?

Institutional asset management is shifting toward a mosaic of quantitative, fundamental, and systematic trading that will alter the type of tools and talent needed to remain competitive, writes the Depository Trust and Clearing Corp. (DTCC)’s Tim Lind. Firms must move beyond the familiar “data is the new oil” cliché. However, it’s clear that if information is the industry’s product, then data is certainly its currency.

In other news

Bill Gates Warns A.I. Is More Dangerous Than Big Tech Will Admit, The New York Times

“I don’t like bringing bad news to people, and I don’t like saying that innovation may be a net negative. But that’s where we are,” Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, said in an interview with the New York Times, in which he accused tech executives of purposely downplaying the risks posed by AI to safeguard the “next trillion dollars” they’re trying to raise.

He called AI the most dangerous tool ever created, scoffed at the idea of voluntary regulation measures for it, and advocated that some jobs should be prohibited from being replaced by AI.

Anyone who reads my columns knows where I stand on AI, so I won’t bother repeating myself. But when’s the last time you had an honest conversation about AI? Have you ever? If you want to have one now, drop me a line: rebecca.natale@infopro-digital.com