Fintech firm EquiLend has suffered an outage that has taken some of its securities lending services offline. The company revealed in a press release that the incident was the result of ransomware. Third-party cybersecurity experts have been engaged to investigate the incident, and ensuring that impacted services regain full functionality “as quickly and safely as possible” is a “top priority”.
The systems affected include multi-asset class trading platform Next Generation Trading (NGT), the post-trade solutions, data and analytics solutions, and regulatory technology (RegTech) solutions.
EquilLend is partially owned by some of the industry’s biggest names, including Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, and JP Morgan. According to a report by Reuters, which quoted figures from S&P Global Market Intelligence, the firm’s lendable assets as of 24 January “stood at US$35 trillion across domestic and international equities, corporate and government bonds, as well as exchange traded products, with around $2.9 trillion on loan”.
