A-Team Insight Author: sharon
Ripple Investments in ZILO and Licuido Expand Transfer Agency, Tokenisation Capabilities
With a focus on providing additional services in the capital markets, payments and liquidity infrastructure provider Ripple has made strategic investments into two companies: ZILO, which provides transfer agency asset technology, and Licuido, a tokenisation platform. Both investments – which collectively bring regulated transfer agency, issuance, and collateral mobility to Ripple’s XRP Ledger (XRPL) –...
Institutions Eye Stablecoins for Payments and Wall Street 2.0; But Understanding and Planning is Key to Success
It was just a dozen years ago that the first stablecoins emerged. The first entrants were BitUSD, a crypto-backed coin, and Realcoin, which was fiat backed. While BitUSD lasted just a few years, Realcoin – which quickly rebranded to Tether – became the undisputed leader in a space now valued at more than $300 billion....
Ten European Banks Kickstart RL1 DLT; Look to Establish Common Infrastructure for Tokenisation Use Cases
Ten European financial institutions are establishing the RL1 Cooperative to create a neutral, member-owned, pan-European DLT utility for tokenised assets, digital money and next-generation financial markets applications. Created as a European Cooperative Society (SCE) based in Luxembourg, the founding members of RL1 – for Regulated Layer One – comprise ABN Amro, Cecabank, Chartered Investment, Crédit...
OneChronos Brings Combinatorial Matching to European Equities
Periodic auctions came to Europe as an answer to the speed race. They are now routine. Several operators run them, and randomised auction lengths and speed-neutral matching have become standard rather than special. A venue arriving today has to say what it does that the others do not. OneChronos, which began production trading on its...
Fanatics Buys BGC’s Exchange and Clearinghouse to Bring Prediction Markets In-House
Global sports platform Fanatics has agreed to acquire Water Street Labs, a CFTC-registered Designated Contract Market (DCM), and CX Clearinghouse, a registered Derivatives Clearing Organization (DCO), from BGC Group. The acquisition gives Fanatics direct ownership of the exchange and clearing infrastructure that will enable it to expand its prediction markets business. Alongside the transaction, the...
ICE Adds Institutional Bond Execution with $6 Billion MarketAxess Acquisition
Intercontinental Exchange has agreed to acquire MarketAxess Holdings for $167 per share in cash, valuing the electronic bond trading platform at approximately $6 billion in equity and $5.7 billion in enterprise value. The price is a 33% premium to MarketAxess’s closing price on 29 July. MarketAxess connects around 2,100 institutional investors and broker-dealers in more...
S&P Global Integrates with Intelligence Data into Capital IQ Pro Platform
S&P Global has begun integrating data assets from its recent acquisition of With Intelligence into its flagship S&P Capital IQ Pro platform. The initial rollout introduces investor allocation and commitment data, fund performance records, fund-level screening across private market asset classes, and editorial commentary from ‘The Deal’. This integration represents the first concrete product output...
Opetek Launches ARIUS Reasoning Platform with Tier One Bank Piloting on FX Options Desks
Opetek has launched ARIUS, a quantitative reasoning platform for institutional trading desks, which is being piloted by traders and quants at a tier-one global investment bank across live FX options workflows in New York, London and Singapore. A second tier-one institution has been approved and onboarded, with go-live expected in the coming weeks. Designed for...
12 Leading Providers of Semantic Layers in Modern Capital Markets Data Stacks
Reconciling fragmented financial data across disparate trading systems, risk engines and regulatory reporting pipelines is a challenge that frequently results in conflicting analytical outputs, costly reconciliation cycles, and elevated operational risk under frameworks like BCBS 239 and FRTB. The enterprise response has been a move away from continuous database consolidations towards centralised semantic layers. Positioned...
AI May Well be a Big Accelerator, But Let’s Not Forget the Destination
By Chris Livesey, chief executive of AutoRek. Across the financial services software landscape, vendors and end-user customers are chasing a new goal, in how fast they can AI-ify or agentify everything that moves to claim unique differentiation and plant a flag for their brand as a market leader. We’ve seen this cycle many times before, for example with internet, cloud...