Abaxx Exchange Selects Eventus for Trade Surveillance

Abaxx Exchange, a new marketplace based in Singapore, has chosen Eventus to provide its trade surveillance platform. Abaxx Exchange commenced trading on June 28, 2024, offering global futures on energy, metals, and other energy transition-focused commodities, starting with liquified natural gas (LNG) and carbon, with plans to introduce battery metals soon.

Abaxx Exchange, under the majority ownership of Abaxx Singapore Pte Ltd., is the first new regulated exchange and clearinghouse focused on physical commodities to be built from the ground up in over a decade. The exchange sought a robust, customisable, and scalable market surveillance tool that could be quickly and easily implemented. Eventus’ Validus platform was selected for its flexibility, strong workflow automation, and the support of an experienced and responsive team.

Eventus CEO Travis Schwab commented: “We are incredibly honoured that Abaxx has entrusted our team to provide the backbone of its critical trade surveillance function through the Validus platform. The innovative commodity exchange has generated significant interest in the industry. Market integrity is a high priority for the exchange, and Abaxx will benefit from our expertise and high-performance surveillance technology used by marketplaces and leading financial institutions across the globe.”

The deployment of the Validus platform marks a significant step in ensuring that Abaxx Exchange can maintain rigorous surveillance and control over its market activities, providing a secure and efficient trading environment for its participants.

REGnosys Contributes Rosetta Language to FINOS

REGnosys has contributed its proprietary language, formerly known as the Rosetta DSL (Domain-Specific Language) and now renamed Rune, to the Fintech Open-Source Foundation (FINOS). This move is part of REGnosys’s broader mission to foster industry-wide collaboration and innovation in regulatory reporting through open-source solutions.

Rune, the language underpinning REGnosys’s digital regulatory reporting solution, is now governed by FINOS. This open-source initiative allows for contributions, testing, and sharing of regulatory logic in a system- and technology-agnostic manner.

Rune integrates seamlessly with REGnosys’s Rosetta, an award-winning data modelling platform also available for free to the community. This integration enhances the platform’s capabilities, making it a robust tool for regulatory reporting.

Major financial institutions, including BNP Paribas, JP Morgan Chase, Standard Chartered, Pictet, and DTCC, are supporting and implementing Rune-powered projects. These projects aim to enhance operational efficiency and resilience in regulatory reporting.

Rune has been successfully deployed in production for ISDA’s Digital Regulatory Reporting (DRR) programme, which uses the Common Domain Model (CDM) to express trade reporting rules as machine-executable code.

Leo Labeis, Founder and CEO of REGnosys, emphasizes the vision of community-driven compliance. Eleanor Kelly, Global Head of Markets Regulatory Change and Control at JP Morgan Chase & Co., highlights the benefits of expressing data requirements through open-source technology.

Syed Ali, Managing Director of Repository & Derivatives Services at DTCC, supports the use of standardized, machine-readable logic for regulatory reporting.

Scott O’Malia, Chief Executive of ISDA, praises the cost-effectiveness and accuracy of the ISDA DRR. Jane Gavronsky, Chief Operating Officer at FINOS, welcomes Rune to the FINOS portfolio and emphasizes its potential to revolutionize regulatory reporting.

Key Features of Rune (Rosetta DSL)

Rune enables a unified representation of data and business logic, allowing various financial market applications to communicate effectively. It abstracts business logic from technical implementation, ensuring that the logic remains consistent and comprehensible across different systems.

The language is designed to be accessible to non-programmers, such as operations and compliance professionals, who can directly write regulatory logic. This accessibility helps bridge the gap between domain experts and IT implementation.

Rune is built to be technology-neutral, leveraging the Eclipse Modelling Framework (EMF). This ensures that models can be represented in a standard format (Ecore) and easily integrated into various technology stacks, whether on-premises, cloud, or hybrid environments.

The Rosetta platform includes code generators that translate models written in Rune into executable code. This automation simplifies the deployment of regulatory logic across different programming languages and systems, enhancing operational efficiency and accuracy.

As an open-source project under FINOS, Rune encourages community contributions. The platform provides a collaborative environment where users can create, edit, and share models, fostering industry-wide cooperation and innovation in regulatory reporting.

Rune has been deployed in production for regulatory reporting, particularly within ISDA’s Digital Regulatory Reporting (DRR) programme. It uses the Common Domain Model (CDM) to express trade reporting rules as machine-executable code, enhancing transparency and compliance across global financial institutions.

Leading financial institutions such as JP Morgan Chase, BNP Paribas, and DTCC have implemented Rune-powered solutions to improve their regulatory reporting processes, demonstrating the language’s practical benefits in real-world applications.

The Rosetta platform, which includes the Rune DSL, offers a comprehensive solution for developing, testing, and deploying regulatory models, providing tools for design, data translation, deployment, and monitoring. This integrated approach ensures that firms can manage their regulatory obligations more effectively, leveraging the power of open-source collaboration to stay ahead of evolving compliance requirements.

Bloomberg Adds Data for Compliance with EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive

Bloomberg has added a data offering to the Bloomberg Terminal that collates data that companies have started to report in line with the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). The offering is also available via Data License for scalable enterprise-wide use.

CSRD expands the range of firms that need to disclose ESG data publicly and broadens reporting to over 1,000 metrics covering both financial and impact materiality criteria, with reporting requirements coming into play in 2025.

The CSRD offering is based on a mapping of European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS) to existing Bloomberg data fields and includes historical data for a subset of fields reported by companies voluntarily or under previous regulatory requirements. Additional fields will be created to ensure clients can access mandatory quantitative disclosures covering both financial and impact materiality. Companies required to report in 2025 are already included in Bloomberg’s coverage, which will be expanded to include companies that will start to report in 2026.

RegGenome Launches GenAI-Optimised Reg-Data Repository

RegGenome, a spin-out from the University of Cambridge, has launched an enriched regulatory data repository powered by Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI). This solution aims to address the increasing regulatory costs and complexities faced by firms by leveraging advanced AI technologies for regulatory operations and compliance management.

A study by Accenture indicates that while 93% of compliance leaders see AI as a simplifier of compliance processes, 90% anticipate a 30% increase in compliance costs over the next two years due to traditional, labor-intensive approaches. RegGenome’s new service provides a jurisdiction-agnostic repository of rich, descriptive, and inferential metadata optimized for GenAI algorithms, facilitating the identification, interrogation, presentation, and management of regulations.

“Our GenAI-optimised data is vital for any firm investing in modernising its data infrastructure and adopting AI. As a data-only provider, we can facilitate the creation of a central regulatory data set that can feed multiple internal use cases. By adopting our data, organisations are well-positioned to leverage the transformative potential of AI,” said Chief Operating Officer Mark Johnston.

RegGenome uses a universal information structure to organize and standardize regulations, operationalizing documentation from any authority in any language. This structure is built on provenance and regulatory standards reviewed by experts at the University of Cambridge, ensuring data integrity, reliability, and relevance. The GenAI-optimized data supports the development of standards-based solutions that enhance the capabilities of foundational large language models (LLMs), enabling reliable management of regulatory changes, policy impact assessments, information retrieval, query responses, and document summarization.

“With flexible delivery methods, our data integrates into any existing application or tool, maintaining continuity with current business operations. We meet you where you are, and that is the type of freedom customers get from a pure data-only provider,” added Head of Product Jonny Scurr.

RegGenome’s data empowers organizations to conduct granular searches, receive timely updates via custom alerts, identify common regulatory obligations across jurisdictions, and efficiently route relevant regulations to appropriate teams. This foundational dataset promises to enhance existing systems and prepares organizations for the evolving regulatory environment.

ESMA Good Practices Statement Hides a Warning on Pre-Close Calls

ESMA recently published a statement titled Good practices in relation to pre-close calls. The statement was prompted by media reports and verification by National Competent Authorities (NCAs) of a link between pre-close calls between issuers and analysts and subsequent volatility, in some cases raising suspicion about possible unlawful disclosure of inside information. 

It should be noted that subsequent investigations of these apparent links didn’t reveal any violation of the Market Abuse Regulation (MAR). 

“Pre-close calls” are communication sessions between an issuer and an analyst or group of analysts who generate research, forecasts, and recommendations related to the issuer’s financial instruments for their clients.  

These “pre-close calls” usually take place immediately before the black-out periods preceding an interim or a year-end financial report during which issuers refrain from providing any additional information or updates. 

The purpose of the ESMA statement is to remind issuers of the legislative framework applicable to pre-close calls and to identify good practices to which issuers should pay particular attention when engaging in such calls. 

Pre-close calls should only provide non-inside information and, whenever inside information is accidentally disclosed during a pre-close call, MAR requires restoration of information parity by making the disclosed information public immediately. 

The statement also includes a collection of best practices observed by National Competent Authorities (NCAs): 

• Assessment of Disclosed Information: Prior to calls, issuers should thoroughly assess the information to ensure it is non-inside information. 
• Public Disclosure: Announce upcoming pre-close calls with details, date, place, topics, and participants via the issuer’s website. 
• Simultaneous Material Availability: Make the materials used in calls (e.g., slides, notes) available on the issuer’s website. 
• Recording Calls: Record the calls and provide recordings to NCAs upon request. 
• Keeping Records: Maintain and publish records of disclosed information on the issuer’s website for public access. 

ESMA and the NCAs consider that following these good practices could reduce the risk of unlawful disclosure of inside information. 

Reactions to the Statement 

Responses from the Trade and e-Comms surveillance vendors emphasise the need for transparency and fairness in maintaining orderly markets that can be trusted.  

Matt Smith, CEO at surveillance solutions provider SteelEye, is well positioned to comment on transparency gaps in the surveillance ecosystem. “ESMA’s statement is a stark reminder that without an emphasis on transparency during pre-close calls, a watchdog crackdown could well be on the horizon. Markets need to remain inclusive and democratic, ensuring everyone has the right to participate with equal knowledge and to make informed decisions. When a select few have unfair access to sensitive information, this of course influences the market – something regulators are evidently keeping a closer eye on.” 

Smith’s concerns are well founded given the recent enforcement actions for shortfalls in e-Comms surveillance monitoring. 

Oliver Blower, CEO of VoxSmart takes a more pragmatic view calling for regulatory clarity and rules instead of the grey areas surrounding issuer pre-close calls. “It is all very well ESMA trying to keep everyone honest, but these are guidelines, not legislation. Clear rules and transparency are key to keeping our markets trustworthy and fair – and this is what most market participants want as well. 

The grey area is when exactly does activity of this nature become a disclosable event to the wider market? At the end of the day, if there is a suspiciously high share price immediately after an analyst call, any regulator is going to need to dig into not only the intricate details behind the trades, but also whether the bank in question provided the full and proper disclosures in a timely manner.” 

Both Smith and Blower emphasize the importance of transparency and clarity in the management of pre-close calls to maintain market integrity and fairness. They share a concern for preventing unlawful disclosures and ensuring that all market participants have equal access to information. Both agree that well-defined practices and guidelines are crucial for fostering trust and inclusivity in the financial markets, aligning with the overarching goal of regulatory bodies to uphold a fair and transparent trading environment. 

Saifr Extends AI-Powered Marcomms Content Compliance Solution

Saifr has extended the functionality of its suite of marketing compliance capabilities to detect comparison, ranking, and rating claims; performance claims made about investment options; testimonials; and references to tax-free or tax-exempt income. Additionally, expanded AI models for marketing optimisation can determine grade-level readability. 

These features join Saifr’s existing compliance suite, which flags promissory, misleading, exaggerated, unwarranted, or ‘unfair and balanced’ text; detects non-compliant images; explains the risk of flagged content; suggests more compliant alternate phrasing; and recommends disclosures.  

Saifr offers multiple ways to access its AI: SaifrReview (a collaborative enterprise workflow solution), SaifrScan (software add-ins, such as Microsoft Word ), and APIs. 

“These offerings are designed to help financial institutions more easily comply with regulations including FINRA 2210, SEC 482, SEC Modernized Marketing Rule, and similar rules, and effectively market to their target audiences,” said Vall Herard, CEO of Saifr. “With the help of AI, Saifr enables compliance and marketing teams to more accurately mitigate risk while developing marketing-optimized, compliant content up to 10x faster.” 

A-Team Group recently featured Saifr following an interview with CEO Herrard. The interview revealed how Saifr’s AI-powered solutions have evolved since the company started in 2020 and offered a glimpse of what might be coming.  

Saifr is a multiple A-Team Group Awards winner and can claim: 

• Most Innovative AI in Regulatory Compliance Initiatives. A-Team Group Innovation Awards 2024 
• Best AI Solution for Regulatory Compliance. A-Team Group RegTech Insight Awards USA 2023.  

FinScan Launches Sanctioned Securities Screening

FinScan, the Pittsburgh-based division of Innovative Systems, Inc. has released FinScan Securities adding sanctioned financial instrument screening to its AML and KYC solutions. 

Screening for sanctioned securities is an increasingly challenging requirement. Data identifying ultimate beneficial ownership is difficult to source and integrate and the number of securities and entities subject to sanctions continues to grow fueled by evolving political situations in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Asia. As a result, firms are required to monitor vast volumes of data to stay compliant. 

Executive orders in 2020 and 2021 (EO 13959 and EO 14032) extended sanctions coverage to indirect investments creating new obligations for asset managers, fund managers, index providers and the investment banks and brokerages that market the funds. Previously, buy-side firms relied on their sell-side service providers to screen their holdings to ensure they have not been issued by entities that are owned, managed by or otherwise connected to sanctioned individuals.  

The capital markets sector is highly attractive to criminals due to its complex and fast-paced nature, allowing rapid and easy movement of illicit funds across borders. This environment requires an advanced, comprehensive compliance solution to ensure adherence to constantly updating sanction lists and regulatory demands. 

As staying on top of regulations has become more onerous, so the penalties have become more severe with firms facing fines in excess of $1 billion for individual breaches. 

“Identifying sanctioned entities in the complex web of securities, structured products, and options has traditionally been highly challenging and reliant on manual processes. Even where organizations have managed to do this, the technology has not been available to organize and manage the results,” said Steve Marshall, Director of Advisory Services at FinScan, “FinScan Securities provides a complete, streamlined workflow from data analysis and clean-up to audit trails and reporting. As a result, time is saved, and risk is reduced by eliminating the need to rely on spreadsheets or manual reviews and alleviating the burden on IT departments to develop and maintain a homegrown solution.” 

FinScan Securities covers a range of jurisdictions and sanctioning authorities, including the UN, OFAC and regulators in Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, the EU, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the UK, and California with further additions in the pipeline.

Droit and FINBOURNE Partner to Produce Position Reporting Solution

Droit, a provider of computational law and regulation, is partnering FINBOURNE Technology, a provider of cloud-based investment data management software, to deliver an end-to-end position reporting solution. The integration embeds Droit’s Position Reporting product that delivers determination of reporting obligations based on consensus interpretations of requirements from Endoxa, a consortium of six global financial institutions, into FINBOURNE’s financial data management platform LUSID. This enables sell-side and buy-side institutions to manage disclosure obligations for long, short and takeover panel reporting.

The unified approach also ensures consistency around complex regulatory interpretations, regulatory clarity and accuracy of reporting. As part of the joint solution, Droit translates and processes detailed guidelines from all major global jurisdictions, automating the decision-making process for shareholder disclosure reporting eligibility. For complete accountability, a traceable audit record is generated for each evaluated position.

Bloomberg Releases Tool for Sustainable Investment Screening

Bloomberg has released a tool that helps investors assess portfolios, funds and indices based on sustainability criteria and thresholds customised by the user. Available on the Bloomberg Terminal and based on the company’s ESG data, the solution facilitates a transparent screening process and can be used for both making investment decisions and to help clients with regulatory compliance.

Users can input their investment preferences by selecting from a wide range of criteria and calibrating precise thresholds from three categories: sustainability targets, exclusion or ‘no harm’ criteria, and good governance requirements. The tool then calculates a percentage figure that shows how much of a portfolio, fund or index is aligned with the user’s criteria and provides a detailed list of all holdings to quickly detect any outliers.

Investors can also use the tool to check, based on their own definitions, if funds align with regulatory obligations including the EU’s MiFID II suitability rules and Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR), the United Arab Emirates’ sustainable finance framework, the UK FCA’s forthcoming sustainability disclosure requirements, and future SEC guidance on ESG disclosures and fund labelling.

ZERO13 Collaborates with Industry Leaders to Launch First Digital Carbon Credit Platform for Renewable Energy

ZERO13, the GMEX Group company operating a carbon exchange, registry and aggregation hub ecosystem, has partnered with Decarb.earth, CarbonCX, and XTCC to introduce a digital platform for end-to-end digitally measured, reported and verified carbon credit distribution, trading, and settlement for renewable energy projects

ZERO13 is a cloud-native, infrastructure-agnostic, decentralised platform that streamlines workflows across various exchanges, participants, custodians, registries, and climate fintech services, integrating digital monitoring, reporting, and verification to provide real-time checks on carbon offset supplies and project provenance. It supports end-to-end distribution across diverse blockchains and APIs, facilitating effective trading and settlement, and overcoming the limitations of the traditional voluntary carbon market (VCM).