Collaboration drives measurable ETF spread improvements for a leading European ETF issuer
London, New York, 31 July 2025: Ultumus, the world’s leading provider of ETF and index data, today announced a partnership with BMLL, the leading, independent provider of harmonised, historical Level 3, 2 and 1 data and analytics across global equity, ETFs, futures and US equity options.
The combination of Ultumus analytics and BMLL data strengthens the data and analytics offering for the global ETF community by combining Ultumus' leading reference and index data with BMLL’s high-quality historical market data and analytics within its scalable data platforms.
In tandem, Ultumus will leverage BMLL’s high-quality data to assess the impact of Ultumus’ Portfolio Composition File (PCF) service on trading efficiency, bringing unparalleled insight into the ETF trading landscape, to the benefit of the mutual, global customer base.
At the same time, BMLL’s global customer base, which includes banks, brokers, asset managers, hedge funds, global exchange groups, academic institutions and regulators, is now able to access Ultumus ETF reference data and ETF issuer-published metrics. Ultumus ETF Data is available within BMLL’s scalable Python research sandbox, BMLL Data Lab, and its market microstructure visualisation platform, BMLL Vantage, before market open, every day, for each region.
A leading European ETF issuer has already benefited from the collaboration. Using Ultumus’ PCF, backed by robust BMLL data and analytics, the ETF issuer was able to analyse its spread performance, which evidenced a 16% reduction in spread threshold breaches and a 12% performance uplift. These results are testament to the fact that the partnership between Ultumus and BMLL will benefit the ETF market overall, leading to tighter spreads, better pricing precision, increased trading efficiency and robust data quality supporting future ETF launches.
Bernie Thurston, CEO, Ultumus, said: “At Ultumus, our focus is on delivering measurable value through data innovation. By utilising BMLL’s granular Level 3 data and analytics, we’re able to quantify how accurate, timely fund data improves trading outcomes and market efficiency for clients using Ultumus’ Portfolio Composition File (PCF) service. This collaboration underscores our commitment to innovation and to delivering real benefits for ETF issuers and the broader trading ecosystem.”
Paul Humphrey, CEO, BMLL, said: “Adding ETF data from Ultumus is part of BMLL’s ongoing strategy to broaden our content and data coverage globally, which already includes historical market data from over 100 trading venues and our equities offering covering 100% of the MSCI World Index.
We’re very excited to collaborate with Ultumus as our global customer base is now able to use these combined data sets to deepen their understanding of ETF liquidity dynamics, how these shift over time, and gain insights that will help them differentiate themselves in a competitive landscape.”
About Ultumus by SIX
Ultumus is the leading provider of ETF and index data, calculation and workflow solutions. It is owned by SIX, the operator of the SIX Swiss Exchange and BME Exchange in Spain. Since launching in 2016, Ultumus has built technology-enabled solutions to capture, normalise, enrich and distribute data daily across the entire ETF and Index ecosystem. Ultumus is headquartered in London and has offices in Singapore and Hawaii.
About BMLL
BMLL Technologies is the leading, independent provider of harmonised, Level 3, 2 and 1 historical data and analytics to the world’s most sophisticated capital market participants, covering global equities, ETFs, futures and US equity options.
BMLL offers banks, brokers, asset managers, hedge funds, global exchange groups, academic institutions and regulators immediate and flexible access to the most granular Level 3, 2 and 1 T+1 order book data and advanced pre and post-trade analytics. BMLL gives users the ability to understand market behaviour, accelerate research, optimise trading strategies and generate alpha more predictably.
Founded in 2014 in the machine learning laboratories of the University of Cambridge, the platform enables researchers and quants across global financial services firms to apply complex statistical techniques to BMLL’s unique big-data sets with applications such as market impact, pre and post trade analytics, order book simulation and compliance. Users no longer need to buy, curate and harmonise data. With BMLL, they gain cost-effective, instant access to a cloud-native Data Science environment via a single web portal, with a long history of the most granular, full order book data across global equities, US equity options, futures and ETFs for back-testing and simulation, delivered directly into their workflows.
BMLL secured $21 million strategic investment in October 2024, led by Optiver, with participation from CTC Venture Capital and existing investors. This follows BMLL's $26 million Series B investment from Nasdaq Ventures, FactSet, IQ Capital’s Growth Fund and Snowflake Ventures in 2022/2023. Prior to that, BMLL raised $36m through Series A and seed funding rounds.
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