A-Team Insight Author: Jeri-Anne McKeon
RealQ Puts Dealer Data and Buy-Side Flow Under One Roof
TP ICAP has brought its dealer data network and its buy-side trading franchise together under a single platform, RealQ – a move aimed squarely at the half of the institutional credit market that still trades by phone. That half has resisted every electronic protocol thrown at it, and closing it is the premise on which...
The FCA’s Wakeup Call: Mature Financial Controls, Immature Trade Controls
By Becki LaPorte, Principal – AML Strategy & Innovation, FinScan. The FCA’s latest report on sanctions systems and controls delivers a verdict that compliance professionals will find both encouraging and concerning. Although financial sanctions programs have matured, trade sanctions compliance has not. The gap between the two is significant and the report highlights this clearly....
Off-Channel Compliance Demands Evidence, Not Just Policy
Off-channel communications compliance is moving beyond which tools firms permit. The deeper challenge is whether firms can evidence control over who is in scope, which channels are approved, how records are captured, how exceptions are escalated and how supervisors reconstruct context when a regulator asks for proof. That was the central theme of A-Team’s RegTech...
Prediction Market Data: The Questions Institutional Buyers Still Cannot Answer
Are prediction markets arriving in institutional workflows faster than the industry has worked out what it is buying? The valuations are real. The distribution deals are real. The research interest is real. What is not settled is a set of questions sitting underneath the adoption story – and a closing fireside session at the recent...
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...