This Week: JP Morgan, Broadridge, Lloyds, JSE, Schroders, and more

JP Morgan adds securities services data mesh to Fusion platform 

JP Morgan’s Fusion platform expanded this week with the launch of a securities services data mesh for institutional investors. This will allow clients to retrieve investment data held by JP Morgan’s custody, fund accounting, and middle-office services using cloud-native REST APIs, Jupyter notebooks, or the Snowflake financial services data cloud.  

Fusion by JP Morgan, as the company has branded it, was released in May 2022. Gerard Francis, head of Fusion and data solutions at the bank tells WatersTechnology that expanding into data management made sense as an extension of JP Morgan’s work as a securities services provider.  

“As part of custody, we do settlement and safekeeping, and as part of fund accounting, we maintain the books and records. One of the decisions we made a few years ago was to provide data management outsourced capabilities to our clients, who are institutional investors. This means we take on all the data management responsibilities for them; that’s really why we launched Fusion.” 

Fusion is compatible with data warehouse Snowflake, and securities services datasets can now be extracted from Snowflake tables. Regardless of an investor’s cloud provider, they can access JP Morgan data using a cloud integration layer. The data mesh uses notifications to alert applications when specific data events happen.  

As portfolios and investments increase in size and complexity, the challenge of ingesting data at scale becomes more difficult. Fusion offers connectivity for clients receiving data from applications running in the cloud or on-premises through the Fusion API.  

“We generate data every day—all the data that the client needs, we publish into the Fusion catalog. At that point, the same dataset can be accessed by the client in multiple ways: into Snowflake, as an API into their data science platform, through Jupiter Python notebooks, and through various SDKs, which make it easier for programmers to work with the data,” Francis says. 

The announcement of the new data mesh comes after JP Morgan added sustainable investment data solutions to Fusion in June of this year. “I can look for anything, say, Scope 3 emissions for a particular company,” says Francis. The user can manage the data, then create a feed and publish it through Snowflake into their internal systems. 

A firm will have its own relationship with a data vendor, but from there, Fusion will normalize the data, clean it, and link it. 

Data has been called the new oil, but with more of it being constantly generated, topics like storage, lineage, and governance are becoming increasingly important to consumers, users, and regulators, alike.   

“I think clients now appreciate the importance of data. I think they are still getting to grips with the complexity. And they will continue to struggle to get it all normalized and managed, because financial data is incredibly complex,” Francis says. 

Francis says that Fusion is an “incremental” release, a link in a chain of several new products to come.  

JSE launches voluntary carbon market in partnership with Xpansiv

The Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) has launched a voluntary carbon market in partnership with Xpansiv, an infrastructure provider for environmental markets. The market will be incorporated as JSE Ventures, a separate legal entity. Local participants can now buy and sell carbon credits and renewable energy certificates held in local or global registries.

Users will get access to the Xpansiv platform’s spot trading, auctions, or requests for quotes for carbon offsets and renewable energy certificates.

Delta Capita launches complete suite of distributed ledger solutions

Delta Capita, a capital markets consulting, managed services and technology provider, announced the launch of its MACH distributed ledger product suite, targeting efficient implementation and execution of complex transaction processing.

In April of this year, Delta Capita acquired distributed ledger technology from SETL to build out its capital markets ecosystem. Montis Group is the anchor client.

The product offers six DLT solutions for trade settlement, tokenization, reconciliations, digital asset issuance and custody, KYC, and improved interoperability between DLT systems.

Broadridge and Iress UK partner on joint OMS solution

Broadridge Financial Solutions has partnered with Iress, a software provider for financial services, on a joint OMS solution for UK broker-dealers. Broadridge’s order management system (OMS) and market-making platform, Tbricks, has integrated into the Iress retail service provider (RSP) network.

The joint offering aims to offer liquidity providers streamlined order management, increased market connectivity, live data and analytics, and compliance. In turn, the two companies are aiming for improved access to market data, execution of trades and risk capabilities for UK retail investors.

Schroders taps Xceptor for internal automation and consolidation

Schroders, a global active investment manager, selected Xceptor, a data automation platform provider, for internal business use cases such as cash flow data handling and customer onboarding.

Schroders first used Xceptor to process incoming transfer agency cashflows into their investment book of record, BlackRock’s Aladdin. Xceptor validated the cashflows with predictions and loaded the data into Aladdin. Xceptor will now also provide data automation and end-to-end process transformation for users.

Using Xceptor, all of Schroders externally sourced data is now run on its processing system, rather than over multiple applications.

Lloyds rolls out digital trading documentation for businesses

Lloyds Bank will allow clients to request digital direct guarantees or standby letters of credit, in a bid to help them trade more efficiently and securely.

The bank currently has a paperless guarantee initiative, to support businesses with high volumes of transactions requiring the issuing of bank guarantees. The new system allows instant delivery to recipients while reducing carbon footprints.

This follows Lloyd’s successful completion of its first digital trade transaction under the UK’s new Electronic Trade Documents Act (ETDA) when it came into effect on 20 September. Lloyds has also recently invested €3 million in Enigio to accelerate the use of digital documentation in trade. 

Backbase releases integration solution

Backbase, an engagement banking platform provider, announced the launch of Grand Central, an integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS). It aims to help banks improve their modernization and digital transformation projects.

The Grand Central integration platform uses BIAN based domain model and unified banking APIs, to connect a channel application to downstream systems such as core banking systems, CRM systems, and external fintechs. Using industrialized plug-and-play connectors, the offerings aims to accelerate integrations for banks.