A-Team Insight Author: Rollings Nicole
When Correlation Breaks: Why Crowding, Not Macro, Is Testing Quant Models
In February 2025, Goldman Sachs told clients the US equity market had become a stock-picker’s market: 74% of the typical S&P 500 stock’s return was being driven by company-specific factors rather than macro forces, against a 20-year average of 58%, and the bank expected that micro-driven environment to persist. Within weeks, sweeping tariff announcements had...
Kaiko Buys Amberdata as Digital Asset Data Consolidation Picks Up Pace
Kaiko has acquired Amberdata, its fifth acquisition and its second in a fortnight, in a deal that points less to any single transaction than to the speed at which the institutional digital asset data layer is consolidating into a small number of scaled providers. The Paris-headquartered firm announced the purchase of the US-based data and...
Immaturity of AI Shines Through in Report Highlighting Persistence of Age-Old Data Challenges
The relative novelty of artificial intelligence use within financial services has been highlighted in a global study of the technology’s adoption, with many data challenges remaining and blind spots in security still widespread. While the 2026 Global AI in Financial Services Report by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance found firms were eager to integrate...
Is Speed Still the Point of a Low Latency Stack?
Latency has been on the capital markets agenda for more than two decades, and for most of that history the proposition was simple: go faster, win more. A panel at A-Team Group’s recent ExchangeTech Summit London, titled “Building the Ultimate Low Latency Highway: Execution Gateways, Order Routing and Ensuring Near Zero Jitter and Determinism”, spent...
Why the Buy Side’s Real Agility Problem is its Operating Model
Most buy-side firms know how to find an opportunity. What an increasing number are discovering is that the gap between identifying one and acting on it has become a structural weakness. And that the weakness sits not in the front office but in the operating model underneath it. That was the recurring argument of a...
Top 13 Client Onboarding Solutions in Capital Markets
Streamlining the Onboarding Lifecycle: A Comparative Analysis of 13 Leading Capital Markets Solutions For institutional broker-dealers, asset managers and investment banks, client onboarding has transitioned from a straightforward administrative function into a complex operational bottleneck. The combination of fragmented global regulatory mandates, ultimate beneficial ownership transparency laws and multi-jurisdictional compliance protocols has steadily increased the...
Buy-Side AI Adoption Moves Into the Execution Phase
ACA Group’s latest research report suggests buy-side AI adoption progressing cautiously from personal productivity desktop tools towards defined compliance and operations use cases. Based on 201 qualified respondents across US-based investment management firms, the report examines AI use across 20 compliance and operations workflows in a market segment where AI exposure is widespread, but...
Data Lineage is Finally Getting the Attention it has Always Deserved, Says Solidatus
For Philip Dutton, chief executive of data lineage specialist Solidatus, operating a business whose data dependencies have no robust lineage controls is like boarding a flight on an aeroplane that has no blueprints. “If they told you they didn’t know how the plane was put together, I’m not sure you’d step on board,” Dutton tells Data...
FCA Sanctions Review Puts Control Evidence at Centre of Screening Debate
The FCA’s latest sanctions review raises the bar for firms to prove that screening systems, data feeds, alert workflows and vendor arrangements work under live sanctions conditions. The review draws on the FCA’s assessment of more than 150 supervised firms since February 2022. It includes examples of good and poor practice across governance, management information,...
Duco Unveils Tool-Surface Architecture to Make Agents Auditable in Post-Trade
In agentic post-trade, explainability remains one of the hardest problems to solve. Agents can already read systems, draft exceptions, propose amendments and assemble workflows. What they have struggled to do – in a way that satisfies a Head of Operations facing a regulator – is leave behind an audit trail that survives scrutiny. Duco’s launch...