IPC Systems, Inc., a leading global provider of secure, compliant communications and networking solutions for the financial markets community, today announced a collaboration with OneAsia, a provider of connectivity, datacenter, managed cloud and technology infrastructure services in Asia, to equip investors around the world with the connectivity and technology critical for reliable, secure participation in the Chinese financial markets. The announcement was made at the start of the 15th Asia Pacific Trading Summit in Hong Kong.

"IPC has a strong presence in the Chinese financial markets," said David Dodd, Senior Vice President and Managing Director, Asia-Pacific, IPC, "Our relationship with OneAsia allows us to provide IPC's global community with connectivity to the growing Chinese capital markets with both domestic and international connectivity solutions."

Via the partnership, the IPC Financial Markets Network (FMN) ecosystem, a dynamic community of more than 6,000 member locations across 700 cities in more than 60 countries, will leverage OneAsia capabilities across major Chinese financial centers to facilitate connectivity to the Chinese financial markets and community. The FMN solutions include Connexus, one of the industry's largest secure data communications platforms providing extranet, WAN, and low latency connectivity, as well as Trader Voice and Enhanced Voice Services (EVS), providing dedicated, secure voice connectivity between global market participants.

"The continuous rapid growth in the Chinese financial market demands wide coverage as well as secure and resilient interconnectivity among both Chinese and global capital market participants," said Charles Lee, Founder and CEO of OneAsia. "Combining our strong fiber network, cross-border interconnectivity and technical support with IPC's robust Financial Markets Network will help take investor confidence and participation in our region to the next level."

Zurich-based additiv, a leading provider of digitalisation solutions to the financial services industry, today announced that it secured funding. The capital will help additiv manage the insatiable demand for cutting edge technology across Europe and Asia, and is the first capital investment round secured by the company. The transaction volume amounts to CHF 21 million.

The investment round, headed by Switzerland based BZ Bank, acting on behalf of clients, and invest-ment vehicle Patinex was facilitated by London based M&A firm Zelig Associates.

additiv has a proven track record of empowering major financial institutions to compete in the digital economy in the face of sustained pressure from fintech alternatives. Recent successes include the launch of Natwest‘s new robo-advice offering for the UK savings and investments market using additiv’s Digital Finance Suite (DFS), the company‘s built-for-purpose development and operating platform. It has successfully executed similar projects with companies including private bank Coutts and the wider RBS Group.

Commenting on the investment, Michael Stemmle, founder and CEO of additiv said: “Firms are in need of state-of-the-art solutions that can be implemented quickly to carve out their positions in fiercely competitive markets. That’s exactly what we provide.

“This funding will finance our international expansion and help strengthen our management team. It will also fuel our production of cutting edge SaaS/cloud based products that ensure our clients are ahead of the curve. It really is crunch time for the sector and this funding allows us to be at our best when our clients need us most.”

Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc. announced that Jabre Capital Partners, the global multi-strategy asset management company, has chosen Broadridge’s integrated trading, portfolio management, and risk management platform to help manage their front, middle and back-office operations.

Jabre will deploy Broadridge’s investment operations platform to manage its sophisticated, multi-asset funds. Broadridge’s fully integrated solution will enable Jabre to streamline and automate workflow around a complex array of traded instruments. Introducing these capabilities can help Jabre meet its pre- and post-trade compliance requirements while providing seamless connectivity to brokers and EMS platforms, and facilitating effective portfolio management and reporting. In addition, Jabre will have access to market and credit risk analysis through Value at Risk (VAR) and stress testing scenarios.

“We were seeking to replace our existing, locally installed systems with a new robust infrastructure that facilitated order management, portfolio management and risk management in a single platform,” said James Cleary, Chief Operating Officer at Jabre Capital. “It was key for us to have a system that is scalable and flexible to evolve with our business. Having done extensive due diligence in searching for the right solution, we found that the Broadridge service met these criteria and offered a comprehensive set of functions and reporting that we needed through a single platform, while also reducing operational risk and increasing cost efficiency across our business.”

“Broadridge is pleased to be working with such a long established and highly regarded hedge fund as Jabre Capital. Given recent regulatory changes and the challenging markets in which asset managers are now operating, we are increasingly seeing established groups replace their current infrastructure to ensure that they are appropriately equipped with an integrated, scalable and future-proof portfolio management solution,” said Mike Thrower, Managing Director, Head of EMEA Sales for Broadridge.  “Broadridge’s success in serving asset managers in Europe comes from more than just a strong technology offering — it is also due to our mature local hosting and support model, which, in combination with our global reach and scalability, is a powerful differentiator.”

Corvil has developed a cybersecurity solution specifically designed to address the unique security needs of today’s electronic trading businesses looking to solve escalating concerns over cyber attacks while demonstrating compliance with evolving regulations.

Powered by sophisticated machine learning algorithms, Corvil “Cara” acts as a virtual security expert that autonomously identifies vulnerabilities and possible attacks within trading environments that often process trillions of dollars’ worth of transactions daily.

In a backdrop where the US Securities and Exchange Commission recently cited cybersecurity as the biggest risk facing the financial system,¹ Cara is the first and only solution to bridge the gap that traditional security solutions have been unable to fill. Given the highly automated nature of electronic trading businesses today, there is a high sensitivity to performance impact. Cara is deployed with zero compromise to trading system and infrastructure speed, agility or performance, which is so intrinsic to the most successful electronic trading businesses.

Cara works by providing specialized protection for the trading environment in tandem with Corvil’s existing analytics appliances. It applies machine learning algorithms to determine and benchmark the normal behavior of activity seen on the network. It then runs multi-dimensional security analytics that detects patterns of compromise, and pinpoints the most important issues for investigation. Cara’s daily cybersecurity intelligence report includes a cyber risk assessment score consumable by c-level executives and outlines the insights required by CISOs and security teams for detailed forensic investigation and response.

Cara is the only security solution that discovers and makes sense of the specific user and business context of all trading sessions, market data streams and other traffic, thereby continually improving the relevance and quality of detected anomalies. This allows it to reduce the prevalence of false positives and provides contextual information that eliminates much of an analyst’s investigative workload by automatically running assessments that they would otherwise carry out manually. Reducing a security team’s investigation time means the ability to more quickly apply expertise to mitigate risk.

“Corvil is deeply embedded in the financial markets industry as our technology watches over electronic executed transactions with a daily value in excess of $1 trillion. We know data exfiltration, data privacy and mitigation of ransomware attacks remain a top priority for CISOs and c-level executives in the financial markets sector, and we are committed to leveraging our expertise and innovate to support their challenges,” said Corvil CEO, Donal Byrne. “We are confident that Cara’s ability will significantly bolster these businesses’ security posture which in turn will provide important assurances to boards of directors and stakeholders concerned with business continuity and risk management.”

Gemalto, the world leader in digital security, collaborates with Finnish-based financial services provider Enfuce to offer enterprises in the Nordics a rapid and cost-efficient deployment of ​​convenient and strong customer authentication using mobile devices. Enfuce has launched an innovative, cloud-based 'authentication as a service' solution, designed to make it simple for financial institutions, retailers and fintechs to secure their mobile applications. The solution is built on Gemalto's Mobile Protector Software Development Kit (SDK) and Confirm Authentication Server (CAS).  Users can decide to be authenticated for the transactions using a PIN code, fingerprint or facial recognition,

New authentication services deployed in weeks - with no start-up fees
Leveraging the comprehensive capabilities of the Mobile Protector SDK, Enfuce's customers can deploy highly secured mobile applications in a matter of weeks, helping them to comply with banking regulations such as PSD2. No start-up fees or investment in internal infrastructure is required and end users can quickly enjoy the benefits of secure and seamless payment and transaction authentication.

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User-friendly two factor authentication now within reach of more enterprises
Gemalto Mobile Protector SDK provides Enfuce's customers with APIs, needed to embed security into their mobile applications, without requiring developers to master security principles. Enfuce delivers and hosts a hassle-free, 24/7 service, including white label solutions that can be tailored to individual corporate requirements. As a result, mobile two-factor authentication is now within reach of a wider range of enterprises. Initially targeting the Nordics, where it has already been sold, Enfuce plans to extend the service across Europe.

"The introduction of this ground-breaking 'authentication as a service' solution reflects our commitment to enable profound changes in the payment industry," said Monika Liikamaa, CEO for Enfuce. "By combining our extensive knowledge of the financial sector with Gemalto's authentication capabilities, we can offer a 'plug and play' service that leaves clients free to focus on core activities."

"Enfuce's innovative service is aimed at banks, financial institutions and any player who want to provide rich yet secure mobile applications to their customers without investing in heavy infrastructure. " said Patrick Kleuters, SVP  Banking and Payment Europe for Gemalto. "It offers an off-the-shelf option with the new PSD2 directive in mind relating to two-factor authentication."​

The Open Bank Project, leading API solution for banks, has partnered with Societe Generale Group, one of the largest European financial services groups, to hold an internal hackathon focused on Open Banking. 

The Clearing Corporation of India (CCIL) and Bloomberg today announced that real-time foreign exchange rates from CCIL will be made available to India’s interbank participants via the Bloomberg terminal. 

Bank Leumi announced that Martin Droney has joined as Executive Vice President, Chief Operations & Technology Officer, responsible for overseeing the rapidly growing bank's technology infrastructure and operations. 

Kx Systems (Kx), a subsidiary of First Derivatives (FD) plc and provider of the industry-leading kdb+ time series database, and Vexata, the leader in high performance enterprise storage systems, announced record shattering results in independent testing by the Securities Technology Analysis Center (STAC®).

With kdb+ running on Intel x86 multi-core processors using the Vexata Array with NVMe Flash SSDs, the solution set new records in 8 of 17 baseline STAC-M3™ benchmarks (the Antuco suite), and 14 of 24 benchmarks in the STAC-M3 scaling suite (Kanaga). The joint solution was able to achieve 36.8 GB/s of effective application-level throughput in bandwidth-intensive year-high bid tests. The solution also shattered existing records for several read-IO intensive queries like volume-weighted average bid, as well as balanced compute and IO workloads like statistical calculations.*

In the era of Big Fast Data analytics, kdb+ has set industry benchmarks for speed and stability in high performance applications. It is widely used in the financial services industry for trading and risk management platforms and across a range of markets such as manufacturing, pharma, the Industrial Internet of Things, utilities and retail which face similarly demanding data challenges. Kx is also at the forefront of the use of predictive analytics, virtual reality, artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques to drive operational intelligence and provide actionable insights.

The Vexata Array, built on Vexata’s breakthrough Real Time Architecture, enables Enterprises to realize an order of magnitude higher performance and scale from their Database and Analytics platforms. Vexata Arrays can be deployed simply and seamlessly into existing SAN environments and alongside existing storage. The Vexata Array is in production and available in a range of capacities at market leading economics.

Glenn Wright, Systems Architect for Kx added: “These results show the mutual benefits gained by placing the latest technology alongside kdb+. What stood out are the streaming I/O performance results, alongside some very good results for discrete market data set queries. This should be particularly appealing to those customers wishing to consolidate their market data on a single storage device being shared between multiple analytics systems, for example between different business functions or business units of an organization.”

Peter Lankford, Director of STAC, said: "Trading firms designed the STAC-M3 benchmark suite to represent a common set of performance-related challenges in financial time-series analytics. Competition requires capital markets organizations around the world to analyze more data in less time. This combination of Kx software and the Fibre Channel-based Vexata NVMe Flash Array established many new STAC-M3 records while running at large scale. “

Zahid Hussain, CEO of Vexata said: “We are very pleased to be working closely with Kx to provide a compelling high performance solution stack that enterprises can immediately deploy for their stock-ticker Analytics. The STAC-M3 results clearly showcase the unique performance benefits achievable through the Kx-Vexata solution.”

Mark Sykes, COO at Kx said: “Kx’s customers are always looking to increase performance for complex analytics on very large datasets. The approach taken by Vexata allows them to do this without the need for them to invest in a large storage system in order to achieve the results they want, lowering their total cost of ownership.”