BNY Mellon – SNB Capital
Back in August, BNY Mellon extended its reach in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, signing a deal with investment bank, SNB Capital, for the roll-out of its joint securities services. 
The joint offering will be made available to institutional and large asset owners based in the Kingdom and combines SNB Capital’s local presence with BNY Mellon’s global custody, asset servicing, data and technology capabilities.
SNB Capital is the securities, asset management and investment banking arm of Saudi National Bank, the largest commercial bank in Saudi Arabia. It is also the largest custodian settling 22% of trades on Tadawul stock exchange, as of the end of 2020.
At the time of the deal, Anthony Habis, head of Middle East and Africa at BNY, said: “BNY Mellon has been serving clients in the region for over 100 years and we are excited to work together to meet the increasingly sophisticated demand of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s institutional clients; to provide data solutions, technical expertise, and breadth of experience.”
The Kingdom has been a hotbed for investment activity in recent months, as global custody banks seek to gain access to what is a significant asset owner base. The Public Investment Fund, for example, is the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, with $430 billion in assets under management.
Citi – Snowflake
Citi’s tie-up with Snowflake in September vowed to ‘re-imagine how data flows across transactions’, providing a new solution for post-trade processes across the industry.
Following the announcement, Snowflake’s solution was integrated with Citi’s flagship securities services data platform Velocity Clarity, with a view of delivering faster, more complete client data.
The partnership combines Citi’s extensive market expertise with Snowflake’s secure data sharing and multi-party permissioning capabilities. This collaboration will offer a solution to control data models and how end-to-end transaction data flows across a business to meet the requirements of global clients.
Citi has a track record of driving innovation in the market, highlighted through previous work with its Innovation Lab network and D10X programmes. It was through those tie-ups that Citi solved an industry problem around proxy voting, which was subsequently shared with industry.
Chris Cox, global head of data and digitisation for Citi securities services, said the vision for this initiative is to deliver a similar outcome to the benefit to the whole market. “Integrating Snowflake with Citi’s Velocity Clarity data platform can help to deliver faster, more complete client data – adding the Snowflake channel option to existing real-time APIs and visualisations – plus opening the door to some other interesting possibilities.”
Northern Trust – Microsoft Azure
The quest for greater data utilisation rumbles on in the global custody industry, with Northern Trust now extracting unstructured data and making it accessible to investors through its tie-up with Microsoft Azure Applied AI Services.
Launched in September, the integration of unstructured data on alternative assets will aim to “fill a crucial missing piece” for asset owners wanting an accurate view of analytics across multi-asset portfolios.
Pete Cherecwich, president, corporate and institutional services at Northern Trust, said: “Our investments in cloud technology, artificial intelligence, blockchain and machine learning will help asset owners achieve a true understanding of their assets and portfolios as a whole.”
The solution will read stored documents and fund manager reports on holdings and performance of hedge funds, private equity and other alternative assets and pull out data points including asset names, currencies and market value.
The custodian said data extraction and integration is the second stage of its digitisation process that will help asset owners access more current information regarding their alternative assets – highly manual investments which traditionally only report on a monthly or quarterly basis.
State Street – BlackRock (for M&G’s middle-office)
In April, Global Custodian reported that State Street would be providing middle-office outsourcing services to UK asset manager M&G, leveraging BlackRock’s Aladdin platform as part of the deal. The agreement was as significant as the blockbuster partnership.
The deal signalled an extension of the decade-strong relationship built between State Street and M&G. The custodian has extended its fund accounting and custody services for the wholesale fund ranges to provide middle-office services, including portfolio services, reference data, cash reporting, transaction management, asset servicing and recordkeeping.
At the time, the Boston-based custodian said it will leverage the Aladdin experience and knowledge from M&G to administer middle-office services, the latest move signifying that custodians are now more willing to use the front- and middle-office platform of their client’s choice.
“We are committed to providing solutions for a wide range of our clients’ needs including our State Street Alpha clients who can utilise both Aladdin and State Street product and services,” said Joerg Ambrosius, chief executive officer, Europe, Middle East and Africa at State Street.
“This marks another important step in helping asset managers to stay focused on their investment process, lower their costs, improve efficiency and deliver desired investment outcomes.”