A-Team Insight Author: Rollings Nicole
AI Agents are Rewriting the Future of Banking Data, Says Smartstream
Intelligent semi-autonomous AI agents promise a powerful solution to many challenges with the financial space. But their need for good-quality data is also highlighting the shortcomings that remain within some institutions’ data architectures. This apparent chicken-and-egg situation is one that Thomas Steinborn, chief product and technology officer at Smartstream, believes can only be resolved by...
Inside Bloomberg’s ASKB Roadmap: the Data Moat Behind the AI
When Bloomberg unveiled its 2026 roadmap for ASKB on 16 April, the headline framing was the evolution of the conversational AI interface – now in beta – from a discovery tool into “a deeply integrated engine for institutional intelligence.” Beneath that framing sits a substantial set of integrations: ASKB will work directly with Portfolio &...
Building for a Market That Never Sleeps: Inside LSEG’s Real-Time Data Platform Optimisation
As data volumes surge and markets move toward 24/7 operation, LSEG is rebuilding the infrastructure that underpins its real-time data services – combining hyperscaler capabilities with private-cloud control to deliver scale, speed and resilience for the next generation of capital markets workflows. The forces reshaping real-time data The demands on real-time market data infrastructure are...
Trillium Surveyor Expands Into Prediction Markets as Capital Markets Interest Grows
Prediction markets are finding early adopters in capital markets across brokers, exchanges, market makers, and infrastructure providers. Activity is most visible on the sell side, where firms are building access points, data services, venue capacity, and liquidity provision. Tradeweb’s partnership and minority investment in Kalshi, Robinhood’s build-out of Rothera Exchange & Clearing with Susquehanna International...
SEC and CFTC Recalibrate Private Fund Reporting for Systemic Risk Oversight
The SEC and CFTC have proposed a substantial reset of Form PF, raising reporting thresholds and streamlining requirements for private fund advisers while preserving supervisory access to data on the largest and most systemically relevant managers. The proposed rule would lift the general filing threshold from $150 million to $1 billion in private fund assets...
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...