CME marks cloud migration milestones, new FIX guidance for brokers, and more

Below you’ll find a lot of news from this week, but none as important as this: Lena Dunham, voice of a generation, is reviving her millennial magnum opus, HBO’s “GIRLS,” for a five-episode run next year. The think pieces to be written! The political outrage to be felt! The fun to be had! Adam Driver, if you’re reading this, please respond to my bat signal.

Announced this week

CME Group announces cloud migration milestones

Derivatives marketplace CME Group has completed initial performance testing for CME Globex in the cloud, reaching new milestones in the ongoing migration of its markets, including:

• Faster round-trip times for trading.
• Ahead-of-schedule construction of the Aurora Cloud Region and co-location facility. The facility, which will host Google Cloud’s new platform to support trading of CME Group markets, is targeted to be available for client testing in mid-2027, in addition to the Dallas disaster recovery facility that has been open for testing since June 2026.
• Livestock market migration to the cloud will take place out of the new Aurora Cloud Region in late 2027. Interim relocation to Dallas is no longer necessary.

LSEG accelerates analysis of years of tick history market data with Nvidia

London Stock Exchange Group is collaborating with Nvidia to help financial institutions analyze large volumes of LSEG tick history data at greater speed and scale using Nvidia cuDF for accelerated computing on Nvidia GPUs. This is achieved without creating another full copy of the underlying dataset while also preserving the licenses, permissions, and controls governing access.

The collaboration brings LSEG’s historical market data closer to the computing environments used for quantitative research, market analysis, and AI. As part of the LSEG Everywhere AI strategy, users can run large-scale data processing on tick history datasets to turn LSEG content into insights faster.

CLS completes infrastructure modernization milestone with Kyndryl

CLS, a financial market infrastructure group delivering settlement, processing and data solutions, and Kyndryl, a provider of enterprise technology services, completed CLS’s migration to a new datacenter environment.

The migration marks a significant milestone in CLS’s multi-year technology modernization program, providing a stronger foundation for the continued delivery of its market infrastructure. The new technology environment strengthens the security, resilience, and operational flexibility of CLS’s services while supporting future growth and evolving market and business requirements.

Sterling Trading Tech, Atlas Digital Markets partner on integrated execution analytics

Sterling Trading Tech, a global provider of advanced platforms, order management technology, and risk solutions, and Atlas Digital Markets, an execution-intelligence company, are collaborating to bring execution analytics directly into the Sterling OMS 360 and Sterling Data Warehouse, where Sterling’s clients manage their orders and hold their order and execution history.

Beginning in the fourth quarter of 2026, Atlas’s transaction cost analysis engine will be available to Sterling clients, allowing them to measure execution quality using their own complete order and execution data and giving broker-dealers a way to measure and evidence best execution.

Sterling and Atlas join forces as the US Securities and Exchange Commission considers rescinding the Order Protection Rule (Rule 611) under Regulation NMS.

Standard Chartered launches RLUSD custody and joins collateral integration with Ripple, LMAX Group

Standard Chartered now supports institutional custody of Ripple USD (RLUSD) issued on the XRP Ledger (XRPL), giving eligible clients access to the bank’s digital asset custody infrastructure. The service is available through Standard Chartered Bank’s DIFC Branch, which is regulated by the Dubai Financial Services Authority.

This marks the next phase of their collaboration to support institutional adoption of RLUSD, combining LMAX Group’s institutional-grade market infrastructure and Standard Chartered’s digital asset custody capabilities within a coordinated operating framework. The parties intend to enable RLUSD as eligible collateral for agreed LMAX Group products and solutions across trading and collateral management.

By mirroring the value of eligible collateral to LMAX Group without requiring the underlying RLUSD to be transferred directly to the trading venue, the arrangement is expected to give institutional clients greater flexibility in how they hold and deploy digital assets for trading, helping reduce transfer-related operational risk, and optimize counterparty exposure while improving capital efficiency.

Etrading Software, Adroit partner to bring UK, EU post-trade fixed-income data to buy-side trading workflows

ETS Connect Plus, a provider of fixed-income data across Europe, and Adroit Trading Technologies, an execution and order management platform for fixed income, currency, and over-the-counter derivatives, have partnered to make the ETS Connect Plus dataset, including the UK bond consolidated tape data, available within Adroit’s order and execution management system.

Adroit clients will be able to see bond, currency and derivatives data directly on trading tickets and order blotters, giving pre-trade context at the point of decision. They will also be able to benchmark execution fills against consolidated market prints to support transaction cost analysis and best execution evidence.

Adroit clients with an ETS Connect Plus license will have access.

FIX publishes guidance for asset manager and broker margin reporting

The FIX Trading Community, the industry association that manages the FIX Protocol, has published guidance defining a standardized messaging framework for margin requirement reporting between asset managers and clearing brokers/swap providers.

The guidance, developed by FIX’s Post Trade Committee, is intended to help buy-side firms request and receive margin information from the sell side (clearing broker/swap provider) in a consistent, scalable, and machine-readable way, supporting more efficient collateral management, exposure monitoring, dispute reduction, and funding decisions.

The specification allows firms to request, receive, and publish margin reports in a standard format. It covers both one-off and ongoing reports, and can show margin information by account, portfolio, instrument, or overall excess/deficit.

Exegy PCAP service offers FPGA-grade, hardware-timestamped raw market data capture

Exegy, a provider of market data and trading infrastructure for capital markets firms, has partnered with Fmadio, a specialist in packet capture systems, on its new end-of-day packet capture (PCAP) service providing raw market data capture with precise timestamps, available in all Axiom consolidated feed points of presence.

With Axiom, Exegy’s consolidated market datafeed service, clients will be able to take advantage of FPGA-grade, hardware-timestamped raw captures, while eliminating the operational and infrastructure burden associated with building or maintaining the architecture themselves.

What you might have missed from us

Semantic density: old wine, or a new vintage?

A new buzzword has dropped. Increasing “semantic density”—the concentration of meaning packed into a given span of tokens, embeddings, or vector space—is a means of driving down additional AI costs while preserving fuller context. But some technologists contend that semantic density simply repackages old data management practices: defining canonical terms, recording lineage, and enforcing governance for machine use.

Northern Trust Asset Management turns ESG data into investable alpha

A collaborative effort between NTAM’s sustainable investing and quant teams has yielded a new framework at the firm called the long-term stakeholder value (LTSV), which systematically identifies companies that create value for stakeholders, including shareholders.

Traditional shareholder theory prioritizes returns to equity holders. NTAM expands on that framework to evaluate how companies create value for a broad set of stakeholders, including customers, employees, suppliers, and the public. “If you’re doing it consistently well across the board, there is a positive intrinsic value in those companies vis-à-vis their peers,” says Valeria Dinershteyn, director for sustainable investing client engagement for EMEA and APAC at the asset manager.

AI regulation: Who’s responsible for eliminating ‘gray areas’?

In this week’s Waters Wrap, Anthony Malakian muses on who is—and should—lead the way on AI regulation in the US. Congress appears uninterested. Industry regulators have yet to introduce new rules, despite lip service. States seem eager, but are they equipped for the job?

Tony sat down with Kaitlin Asrow, acting superintendent of the New York State Department of Financial Services, to see how the Empire State is thinking about it.

How Quoniam boosted its sentiment strategy by adding an LLM

At a time when buy-side firms are seeking ways to boost quant strategies using large language models, Quoniam Asset Management says an LLM upgrade of its news sentiment model in February lifted one fund’s Sharpe ratio by a fifth.

By adding an LLM to its system to score news sentiment, the Frankfurt-based quant equity manager says it can now derive scores from the parts of news that relate exclusively to the future—that’s to say, the parts most likely to move markets.

Canton: has Wall Street found its blockchain?

Like many denizens of the digital markets, Canton—a spin-off from Digital Asset Holdings—can initially look confusing to outsiders. It’s a blockchain, and it has its own way to exchange value: Canton Coin. But it’s not a trading platform, laden with funky-sounding cryptocurrencies. And no one is coming to Canton because they want to trade its native coin.

Instead, Canton aims to deliver a gleaming new approach to settling securities transactions, and its success will ultimately rest on the network it can build.

The Big Bang—a complex 40-year data journey yet to reach its destination

The Big Bang not only refers to how the universe evolved. It also refers to the event that marked the deregulation and privatization of the London Stock Exchange in October 1986. In this guest column, Finbourne’s Gus Sekhon reflects on the event and how it removed barriers to markets and information. But there’s still more to do. 

In other news

CFTC staff were told to retract analysis of suspicious oil trades, Bloomberg

Babe, wake up, new unprecedented times.

After President Trump reversed threats to strike Iranian power plants in March, billions of dollars’ worth of perfectly timed contracts betting oil would fall made a lot of people rich(er) and prompted whispers of insider trading. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission looked at the incident, electing to refer the matter to the Division of Enforcement, which would weigh whether to launch a full investigation.

Then, strangely, a senior adviser to the agency’s Trump-appointed chairman, Michael Selig, told a supervisor within the market oversight team to retract the referral—the first such action of its kind.

This story from Bloomberg examines the “eye-popping” day of trading that took place on March 23 and details some more eye-popping behavior and apparent shenanigans that continue to take place inside the body responsible for overseeing the US’ commodity futures markets. It doesn’t exactly inspire confidence, but it does make you feel… something.