A-Team Insight Author: Rollings Nicole
Are Prediction Markets Becoming Data Sources Before They Become Trading Venues?
Prediction markets have become increasingly visible in financial markets over the past two years, fuelled by rapid growth in platforms such as Kalshi and Polymarket and their prominence around elections, monetary policy and geopolitical events. For institutional investors, however, their most immediate value may lie less in trading the contracts themselves than in the stream...
Castellum.AI’s Financial Crime Benchmark Finds Accuracy & Consistency Gaps in Standalone LLMs
Castellum.AI announced its FinCrime Agent Benchmark (FCA Bench) in September that compares the performance of nine standalone large language models (LLMs) performing financial-crime checks and when those same models operate within the Castellum.AI Harness. The benchmark measures risk identification accuracy (sanctions, politically exposed persons (PEPs) and adverse media screening), applying an institution’s standard operating procedures...
Duco Maps a Path Towards Agentic Post-Trade Operations
Duco is extending agentic AI deeper into post-trade operations following production trials in which 12 financial institutions recorded an average 76% reduction in time spent on manual reconciliation work. The participants in Duco’s Pacesetters programme, which include BBVA, Blackstone Credit & Insurance and CIBC Mellon, reported reductions of more than 91% in the time required...
Buy vs. Build Now Has Two Answers in Investment Operations
By Pat Conroy, Head of Strategy, Product & Innovation, STP Investment Services. An operations leader at a mid-market investment manager is sitting across from a vendor demo. The pitch is compelling, but in the back of their mind, one question keeps surfacing: should we just build this ourselves? A year later, that same firm is...
Bloomberg Enterprise MCP Brings Market Data into the Agentic AI Workflow
Bloomberg has launched an enterprise AI access layer for its Data License Plus (DL+) offering, giving clients’ AI agents a standardised way to discover, interpret and retrieve licensed Bloomberg data across more than 100 million securities and over 50,000 fields. Bloomberg Enterprise Model Context Protocol (MCP) combines the data with metadata, semantic context and entity...
Trading Technologies Expands Multi-Asset Push with TRAFiX Acquisition
Trading Technologies (TT) has acquired equities and equity options technology provider TRAFiX, filling a significant gap in its expanding multi-asset platform and setting out a roughly 12-month path towards integrating the two firms’ trading technology. The deal extends TT’s coverage into global equities and equity options through TRAFiX’s order and execution management systems (OEMS), FIX...
BMLL and Simudyne Bring Reactive AI Simulation to Trading and Market Structure
BMLL and Simudyne have partnered to combine granular historical order book data with generative AI and agent-based simulation, creating simulated markets that can respond dynamically to trading activity rather than simply replaying historical events. The collaboration brings BMLL’s harmonised Level 2 and Level 3 historical data into Simudyne’s Pulse intraday market simulator. Simudyne is using...
Volante Technologies Partners with Circle to Offer Stablecoin Payments
Payments platform Volante Technologies has formed a strategic collaboration with stablecoin issuer Circle designed to ease the integration of Circle’s USDC into the payments operations of financial institutions. USDC – which is pegged 1:1 with the US Dollar – is the world’s second most liquid stablecoin, with around $75 billion in circulation. Via the collaboration,...
Citadel Securities Chooses Fireblocks for Digital Assets Infrastructure
Citadel Securities has selected Fireblocks to provide digital asset infrastructure to support its tokenisation initiatives. The decision follows a successful live demonstration on 15 July, during which Citadel deployed Fireblocks technology to participate in a pilot that was led by the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC). The demonstration served as a precursor to the...
NYSE Partners with Blockchain.com to Boost On-chain Trading Platform
In a strategic move to support its embryonic digital assets initiatives, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) is partnering with crypto infrastructure powerhouse Blockchain.com to make tokenised equities and ETFs available to the latter’s 44 million verified retail users across 70+ jurisdictions. The tokenised products will be traded on the NYSE’s upcoming digital assets ATS, which...