A-Team Insight Author: Jeri-Anne McKeon
The UK Bond Tape Goes Live – And the Real Work Begins
When the UK’s bond Consolidated Tape goes live on 22 June, it will have cleared every regulatory hurdle in its path. ETS Connect UK secured Financial Conduct Authority authorisation as the appointed provider earlier this month, closing a process that ran for the better part of two years. Yet the participants building the tape, scrutinising...
The Hidden Challenge Lurking Beneath Energy Trading’s Bumper Profits
By Ami Katschinski, CEO and co-founder, Sphere. Sky-high trading profits earlier this year reignited the age-old debate of how, during market turbulence, some energy firms emerge as victors while others find themselves on the loss-making side of the trade. Geopolitical conflict has, and always will, create a frenzy of noise and opportunity for massive profits....
What the 2026 TradingTech Insight Awards USA Reveal About the Direction of the Trading Stack
The trading stack that North American capital markets ran on five years ago is not the one they run on now. Front-office systems that once stood alone are being asked to talk to one another. Data that was once simply delivered is now expected to drive decisions. And the question vendors hear from buy-side and...
MCPs in Data Management: Bringing New Order to Private Markets
Financial institutions have begun deploying Model Context Protocols (MCPs) as they have expanded the use of artificial intelligence applications and agents. The technology developed by Anthropic is an open-source contextual layer that helps coordinate models and data, enabling AI applications to connect with a multitude of other platforms and processes. In the first of a...
Direct Lending Practitioners Target Large Tech Budget Growth on Data
An overwhelming majority of private credit market practitioners are planning to substantially increase their technology budgets as they seek to address risks that are contributing to concerns about the direct lending sector. The Compass 2026 survey conducted for Oxane Partners – a technology provider for credit and other private markets – found that almost four-fifths...
Is the Real Value of Intraday Alternative Data in Risk, Not Alpha?
Intraday alternative data has long been the preserve of high-frequency and systematic desks, where speed provides an edge. But ask practitioners what decision it actually changes for a discretionary book, and the answer is rarely about generating a new trade, it is more about testing the one already on. Sizing, conviction and the risk sitting...
Next Generation Futures Trading Platform for Brokers and Prop Firms by Devexperts
By Jon Light, Senior Director of Product Management at Devexperts. US futures markets have gone from strength to strength in recent years, reflecting recognition among investors of this instrument as a highly effective way to express directional views and hedge risks pertaining to the global economy. Retail traders, too, continue to flock to futures due...
Adverse Media Screening Moves From Search to Risk Intelligence
Financial institutions have accepted adverse media screening as a core element of financial crime compliance, but the next challenge is more exacting: proving that the right entity is being screened, across the right sources, with a decision trail that can withstand scrutiny. That is the operational issue beneath Ripjar’s report, The State of Adverse Media...
MiFID II Research Reforms Put Joint Payments Back on the Buy-Side Agenda
June 6, 2026, marks the start of a new phase in Europe’s research-payment regime, with MiFID II reforms allowing investment managers to use joint-payment arrangements for execution and external research. The change gives buy-side firms more flexibility after years of research unbundling, but it also tests whether firms can rebuild the commission-management, governance and evidence...
The Industry Keeps Talking About 24/5 Trading, But Does It Actually Want It?
A panel convened to discuss the engineering of always-on markets spent most of its time on a more basic question: does anyone actually want them? The appetite for round-the-clock equity trading, it turned out, is far harder to find than the conversation about it would suggest. The session at A-Team Group’s ExchangeTech Summit London, entitled...