A-Team Insight Author: Rollings Nicole
Financial Markets Need Their Own Mission Control
By Diederik Geeraerts, CEO at Taskize, a Euroclear company. With the Artemis II astronauts back down to Earth after travelling a quarter of a million miles to the Moon and back, the mission stands as a reminder of what success in complex systems really depends on. Not perfection, but the assumption that things can go...
New Cloud-Native OMS Valstro Goes Live at Top-Ten US Equities House
Sell-side equities order management is not a market that often welcomes new entrants. The platforms that broker-dealers run on tend to have been in production for a decade or more, and the cost of switching has long been a deterrent to anyone considering a move. New York-headquartered Valstro, which emerged from stealth this month with...
Robust Data Management Still the Silver Bullet for AI Challenges
As the maturity of artificial intelligence applications evolves, financial institutions are finding that the solution to the challenges associated with the technology of data quality and trust can be found in data management. Guaranteeing good outcomes from their models requires that organisations feed them good data, and the only way to ensure that is through...
FCA Market Soundings Review Puts Pre-Deal Controls Under Scrutiny
The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has used its multi-firm review of market soundings in UK equity capital markets (ECM) to evaluate how a long-established issuance practice affects market quality, information control and investor targeting. The review covered 63 ECM transactions in UK listed shares between January 2023 and June 2025, including fifty accelerated bookbuilds (ABBs)...
When Everyone Has LLMs, Who do Quants Still Hire?
The democratisation of alternative data has been a recurring theme at industry conferences for several years. The arrival of capable large language models has accelerated it. Datasets that once required specialist teams to ingest and structure can now be parsed by anyone with a reasonable prompt; signals that once took weeks to extract can be...
TMX Agrees to Acquire Cboe Canada and Australia, Reshaping Canadian Market Structure
TMX Group has agreed to acquire Cboe Australia and Cboe Canada from Cboe Global Markets for US$300 million (C$409 million), in a transaction that removes TMX’s principal challenger in Canadian equities trading and listings and folds Cboe’s Australian venue into the Toronto-based operator’s growth ambitions. The Canadian component is by far the more consequential leg...
xyt Layers Natural-Language AI onto Trading Data Platform as Race for AI-Ready Analytics Intensifies
xyt, the independent trading data intelligence platform formerly known as big xyt, has introduced a set of AI-powered capabilities designed to let clients query its datasets in natural language, integrate its data into their own AI environments, and generate executable analytical outputs from a prompt. The announcement positions the firm in an increasingly crowded field...
Clearstream Pulls Tokenised Securities into the Institutional Collateral Stack
The Deutsche Börse Group CSD’s partnership with Ondo Finance and 360X places tokenised equities and ETFs inside regulated European post-trade infrastructure, starting with US names – and sets up a two-way bridge between traditional collateral pools and on-chain venues. Clearstream has taken a visible step towards integrating public-blockchain assets into its institutional post-trade infrastructure, partnering...
Private Market GPs Unhappy with Data Availability, Unsure About AI Value
General partners (GPs) within the private equity space are dissatisfied with the quality of data available to them at a time when technology is rapidly transforming the sector. Despite being upbeat about the prospects for deals in the coming year, fund allocators are more pessimistic about their operations amid a shortage of digital operational and...
Beyond the Benchmark: Bloomberg Extends BCOM for a Fragmented Commodity Market
When the Bloomberg Commodity Index (BCOM) was launched in 1998, the architecture made sense for its time. Liquidity in commodity futures was concentrated in North American contracts denominated in US dollars, and the methodology was built accordingly. Twenty-eight years later the way global commodity markets operate and the way institutional investors want to access them...