Trading
Corvil Introduces AI-Powered “Intelligence Hub” to Help Electronic Trading Firms Achieve Optimal Execution Quality and Operations

– The solution delivers powerful big data analytics insights to business and operational users without the traditional lengthy timelines and costs –
Corvil today announced Intelligence Hub, the next generation of digital intelligence to improve the performance, agility and digital experience of today’s Electronic Trading businesses.
This new solution has the potential to dramatically change how they see, manage, and improve quality of execution, client experience, and operations.
Electronic trading businesses require intelligence that correlates and understands changes in the critical dimensions of trading outcomes, financial performance, client experience, and underlying technology performance and security. Intelligence Hub provides proactive alerting on changes in these dimensions and allows business and operations teams to flexibly visualize, explore and analyze this key information for more informed action.
“Intelligence Hub has enabled us to quickly see the business how we need to, understanding important activity about customers, how they are experiencing our service, and why,” said a Managing Director at a Global Bank. “From improving customer engagement and outcomes to increasing operational efficiency and providing better intelligence for business decisions, this new level of insight has become imperative to running our business.”
Applying machine learning and big data analytics to Corvil’s unique capture of high fidelity business data from the network, Intelligence Hub accurately identifies anomalies, triages areas of greatest concern, and has capabilities to predict conditions for improved planning.
“In today’s competitive trading environment, firms require greater understanding of their execution and how clients are experiencing their service. Corvil is committed to empowering firms with the best insight and intelligence, to optimize their trading business,”said Donal Byrne, Corvil CEO. “Intelligence Hub marks a major development in extending Corvil’s unrivalled capabilities in deriving intelligence and analytics from network data to wider teams to ultimately help trading firms to consistently move fast and stay secure.”
Corvil Analytics engines provide a rich, precision-sequenced, and normalized source of data from network communications, creating an ideal dataset for AI application. Rapidly deployable, Intelligence Hub ingests this real-time streaming data, as well as certain external data sources and, correlating performance anomalies, highlights areas for action. To enable efficient investigation and analysis workflows, Intelligence Hub maintains a full record and traceable links to source data, which is also stored for forensics and compliance purposes.
Intelligence Hub also provides a comprehensive set of easy-to-use, visualizations, allowing multiple teams (individual desks, IT operations, network, security, risk and compliance, etc.) to see, explore, and perform multidimensional analyses of the information of greatest relevance and share findings in a consumable manner.
In contrast to many bespoke big data analytics efforts, Intelligence Hub provides a ready, extensible, self-service solution, providing client intelligence, execution quality analysis and insight into securities, counterparties, venues and trade plant performance, all correlated, all driven from a consistent, accurate data source.
“We have designed Intelligence Hub with accessibility and extensibility in mind, to offer an intuitive user experience for multiple roles and to enable them to apply machine learning-driven anomaly detection to the data elements they each deem most important,”said Donal O’Sullivan, Corvil VP Product Management. “Intelligence Hub provides a unique business and operational intelligence solution that can address some of the most pressing performance, transaction and compliance questions.”
What Analysts are saying:
“The FX markets have reached a high water mark in penetration, with nearly 80% of market participants trading in an electronic environment. For firms to excel over the competition going forward, they will have to optimize their access to data and the analytics needed to put that data to work. Products such as Corvil’s Intelligence Hub offer the potential of providing performance data across a spectrum of e-trading metrics.”
Dan Connell, Managing Director, Greenwich Associates
“As trading becomes increasingly electronic it becomes possible and increasingly imperative to measure and analyze virtually every electronic interaction. As this process matures it becomes imperative to measure and analyze trading data in increasingly finer grain increments and at increasingly greater analytical depth for better execution quality and counterparty management.“
Larry Tabb founder and Research Chairman of TABB Group
“Given the massive trade and order messaging rates that keep growing both in volume, speed and across asset classes, capital market players need to better understand the state of their orders/fills/data with nanosecond precision. The cost of downtime, venue or counterparty issues, and the associated risks are so great, trading and operations need to understand, analyse, and predict these immediately. These data sets are fertile ground to leverage machine learning to the utmost in the capital markets.”
Brad Bailey, Research Director, Capital Markets, Celent
“Corvil’s Intelligence Hub combines dynamic and reliable rich data with machine learning and persona-driven awareness. As such, the Intelligence Hub can serve as a bridge to enable superior IT-to-business alignment, with unique insights into business ecosystem interdependencies as well as application and infrastructure behaviors. In parallel, it can help to bridge operations and security requirements to support superior levels of efficiency on both sides of the Sec/NetOps handshake, and in this way unify IT more effectively as a whole.”
Dennis Drogseth, Enterprise Management Associates, Vice President
Corvil Intelligence Hub is a software solution, deployable on customer hardware or in the cloud and can be easily scaled out to support the needs of organizations of all sizes. It is currently in use by early adopter customers and will be generally available later this summer.
Trading
Energy stocks drag down FTSE 100, IG Group slides

By Shivani Kumaresan
(Reuters) – London’s FTSE 100 slipped on Thursday, weighed down by falls in energy stocks as oil prices slid after a surprise increase in U.S. crude inventories, while IG Group tumbled on plans to buy U.S. trading platform tastytrade for $1 billion.
The blue-chip FTSE 100 index lost 0.4%, while the domestically focussed mid-cap FTSE 250 index also slid 0.4%.
Energy majors BP and Royal Dutch Shell fell 3.2% and 2.5%, respectively, and were the biggest drags on the FTSE-100 index. [O/R]
“What is holding back the UK is a lack of tech stocks to capture the ‘rotation’ back into tech seen since Netflix results,” said Chris Beauchamp, chief market analyst at IG.
“Stock markets overall are much quieter today, looking so far in vain for a new catalyst for further upside.”
The FTSE 100 shed 14.3% in value last year, its worst performance since a 31% plunge in 2008 and underperforming its European peers by a wide margin, as pandemic-driven lockdowns battered the economy and led to mass layoffs.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said it was too early to say when the national coronavirus lockdown in England would end, as daily deaths from COVID-19 reach new highs and hospitals become increasingly stretched.
IG Group tumbled 8.5% after announcing plans to buy tastytrade, venturing into North America after a stellar year for the new breed of retail investment brokerages.
Ibstock jumped 7.3% to the top of the FTSE 250 after the company said fourth-quarter activity benefited from better-than-expected demand for new houses and repairs.
Pets at Home Group Plc rose 2.2% after reporting an 18% jump in third-quarter revenue, boosted by higher demand for its accessories and veterinary services as more people adopted pets during lockdowns.
(Reporting by Shivani Kumaresan in Bengaluru; editing by Uttaresh.V and Mark Potter)
Trading
Wall Street bounce, upbeat earnings lift European stocks

By Amal S and Sruthi Shankar
(Reuters) – European stocks rose on Wednesday after Dutch chip equipment maker ASML and Swiss luxury group Richemont gave encouraging earnings updates, while investors hoped for a large U.S. stimulus plan as Joe Biden was sworn in as president.
The pan-European STOXX 600 index closed 0.7% higher, getting an extra boost as Wall Street marked record highs.
All eyes were on Biden’s inauguration as the 46th U.S. President, with traders betting on a bigger pandemic relief plan and higher infrastructure spending under the new administration to boost the pandemic-stricken economy.
Tech stocks rallied to a two-decade peak in Europe after ASML Holding NV rose 3.0% to all-time highs on better-than-expected quarterly sales and a strong order intake for 2021.
Meanwhile, Richemont rose 2.8%, after posting a 5% increase in quarterly sales as Chinese splashed out on Cartier, its flagship jewellery brand.
Britain’s Burberry jumped 3.9% after it stuck to its full-year goals, saying higher full-price sales would boost annual margins, while Asian demand remained strong.
The pair boosted European luxury goods makers that are heavily reliant on China, with LVMH and Kering gaining between 1% and 3%.
“Any sign that retail spending is picking up in China is going to be a boost to the Western markets and those heavily exposed to it,” said Connor Campbell, financial analyst at SpreadEx.
The European Central Bank is set to meet on Thursday. While no policy changes are expected, the bank could face more questions about an increasingly challenging outlook only a month after it unleashed fresh stimulus to bolster the euro zone economy.
“With the new round of easing measures fully in place and no new forecasts to be presented tomorrow, it should be a fairly uneventful day for the euro,” ING analysts said in a note.
Italy’s FTSE MIB gained 0.9% and lenders rose 1.6% after Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte won a confidence vote in the upper house Senate and averted a government collapse.
Conte narrowly secured the vote on Tuesday, allowing him to remain in office after a junior partner quit his coalition last week in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Daimler AG jumped 4.2% after its Mercedes-Benz brand unveiled a new electric compact SUV, the EQA, as part of plans to take on rival Tesla Inc.
Germany’s Hugo Boss added 4.4% after Mike Ashley-led Frasers said it boosted its stake in the company.
(Reporting by Sruthi Shankar and Amal S in Bengaluru; Editing by Shailesh Kuber and Arun Koyyur and Kirsten Donovan)
Trading
Miners lead FTSE 100 higher on earnings cheer

By Shivani Kumaresan
(Reuters) – UK’s FTSE 100 rose on Wednesday as miners gained after a strong production forecast from BHP Group, while encouraging updates from luxury brand Burberry and education group Pearson drove optimism about the earnings season.
BHP Group Ltd climbed 2.8% after it forecast record iron ore production for fiscal 2021, helped by high prices for the commodity. Other miners Rio Tinto, Anglo American and Glencore rose more than 2%.
Global markets rallied in anticipation of more fiscal spending as Joe Biden prepared to take charge as the 46th U.S. president.
“There is a view in the markets that more spending is in the pipeline, after all, Mr Biden will want to start his presidency on a positive note,” said David Madden, market analyst at CMC Markets UK.
The FTSE 100 index rose 0.4% and the domestically focussed FTSE 250 index added 1.4%.
The FTSE 100 has recorded consistent monthly gains since November after the sealing of a Brexit trade deal and hopes of a vaccine-led economic recovery, but has recently lost steam as tighter business restrictions sparked fears of a slow rebound.
Burberry rose 3.9% as it stuck to its full-year goals and said higher full-price sales would boost annual margins and Asian demand remained strong.
Global education group Pearson jumped 8.6% after its global online sales grew 18% in 2020, helped by strong enrolments in virtual schools.
WH Smith Plc surged 10.4% to the top of the FTSE 250 index as its trading during Christmas was ahead of its expectations.
(Reporting by Shivani Kumaresan in Bengaluru; editing by Uttaresh.V, William Maclean)