A-Team Insight Author: sharon
Thanks to LayerZero, Tether Extends Reach with Stellar. Stellar Benefits Now; More Chains to Follow?
Via an integration developed by LayerZero Labs, Tether – the world’s most popular stablecoin – is now available on the Stellar blockchain. While adding Stellar represents an immediate significant addition to Tether’s USDT reach, by leveraging LayerZero’s Omnichain Fungible Token (OFT) standard, in the future, extending Tether to other blockchains theoretically requires little effort. Before...
The New Demands on Fixed Income Pricing Infrastructure
Fixed income pricing has always involved making sense of imperfect information. Liquidity is fragmented, many instruments trade infrequently and establishing fair value can require considerably more judgement than in more transparent markets. But the demands being placed on pricing and valuation infrastructure are changing. Firms increasingly need valuations that are not only accurate, but timely,...
How QuantumStreet AI Tackles the Journey From Signal to Portfolio
AI is becoming increasingly sophisticated at identifying patterns and generating investment signals from disparate sources of financial and market data. But for systematic investors, those signals still have to be converted into something much more concrete: a portfolio that determines which assets to hold, in what proportions, and with what degree of conviction. Doing that...
FCA Misconduct Rules Put Surveillance Evidence and HR–Compliance Workflows to the Test
The Financial Conduct Authority’s expanded non-financial misconduct rules took effect on 1 September, bringing around 37,000 non-bank firms within a broader conduct regime. Firms now need to show how complaints, communications evidence and employment investigations inform regulatory decisions. New rule COCON 1.1.7FR covers serious work-related bullying, harassment and violence towards colleagues. It brings non-bank firms...
SEC Crypto Proposal Opens a New Funding Route and a New Compliance Cycle
The SEC is proposing new fundraising rules for crypto projects that sell tokens while building a blockchain network or application. Regulation Crypto Assets would allow qualifying developers to raise capital from a broad investor base and support secondary trading through tailored exemptions from Securities Act registration. However, these new freedoms come with additional regulatory burdens....
Moving Up the Value Chain: 3AI on AI, Alternative Data and Investment Intelligence
Traditional financial and market information now sits alongside news, sentiment, analyst estimates and a growing universe of alternative datasets, creating an increasingly rich information environment for investment firms. But access to more data doesn’t necessarily translate into better investment decisions. Firms still have to establish which information has genuine predictive value, turn disparate datasets into...
Beyond the API: FactSet on Making Financial Data Ready for Agentic AI
The effectiveness of an AI agent ultimately depends on the quality, context and structure of the information it can access. For investment firms, that puts familiar challenges around data quality, provenance and integration firmly back on the agenda – while potentially changing what they expect from their data providers. “When you’re selling data, you’re not...
AI Won’t Replace Compliance Professionals, but the EU’s AMLA Will Change How They Work
As the EU’s new Anti-Money Laundering Authority raises expectations around AML, firms are moving beyond transaction monitoring towards behavioural intelligence. Adam McLaughlin, Director of Financial Crime at Fenergo, argues that whilst AI will become central to that transition, human judgement remains the deciding factor. Historically, financial institutions have approached anti-money laundering as a process centred...
Databento and the Consumerisation of Market Data
Institutional market data has long been associated with complex licensing, specialist infrastructure and lengthy procurement processes. Much of that complexity is unavoidable: exchange data can be technically demanding, commercially restricted and costly to distribute at scale. However, the expectation around how that data should be accessed is changing. As financial firms become more accustomed to...
Appital Brings High-Touch Risk Liquidity into the Electronic Workflow
Appital,the institutional buy-side liquidity platform, is extending into an area of equities trading that has remained stubbornly dependent on high-touch interaction, adding continuous institutional risk pricing through a new integration with Citadel Securities. The development, part of the rollout of Appital V2, will give institutional asset managers electronic access to extended liquidity across more than...