An interview with Founder & CEO, Haider Mannan.
Investment screening has its greatest operational impact before a trade, when a firm needs a defensible compliance decision without delaying execution. BIGTXN founder and chief executive Haider Mannan built the company around that constraint. “Because if you’re holding up execution, it’s costing the business,” he told RegTech Insight.
Founded in 2021, BIGTXN provides monitoring and screening data for pre- and post-trade controls. Its approach combines instrument-level matching with contextual data prepared for client workflows. The aim is to give firms an actionable view of whether they can trade or hold a security without extensive internal remediation.Data Quality as the Starting Point
Mannan developed the idea while working with regulatory and investment data at vendors and financial institutions. During a large Solvency II programme for an insurance asset manager, several hundred sources had to be normalised and enriched before they could feed an internal model. He estimates that data cleansing, management and enrichment absorbed around 70% of the programme’s budget or effort.
Through that project, Mannan saw how the market-data model shifted work to clients. Vendors supplied broad datasets, while financial institutions still needed teams to cleanse, enrich and normalise the information before it could support operational controls. BIGTXN set out to perform more of that work before delivery.
Mannan chose investment screening because pre-trade delays carry an immediate business cost. The company built a data management platform alongside a matching engine. “The matching engine was a crucial part here,” he said. The engine processes an entity dataset of over 500 million records and a security dataset of several hundred million instruments, according to Mannan. BIGTXN overlays those datasets with regulatory rules and conditions, producing trusted output that he says is certified and validated for use in client systems.
At the time of writing, the company stands at 11 employees with plans to double that headcount over the next 12 to 18 months while raising capital. BIGTXN’s development centre is in Madrid, with operations and client-facing teams based in London and a sales office in Zurich. It is also preparing to establish a presence in Austin, Texas and Singapore to extend customer support across US and Asia Pacific time zones. Mannan said the company was “just about to complete SOC 2 Type II certification and embarking on ISO 27001”.From PoC to Distribution at Scale
A trading control must translate a sanctioned person or entity into the instruments affected by the designation. That requires links among designated parties, related entities and issuers, ownership and control relationships, security identifiers and the applicable sanctions regime.
BIGTXN maps those relationships to tradable instruments and produces structured output for screening, portfolio monitoring and investigation. Its first major proof of concept involved a large Nordic bank seeking to replace an enterprise data provider. Mannan said the project established that the company could handle the required volumes and changes affecting securities.
That processing capability now underpins products distributed by larger providers. Dow Jones Risk & Compliance Financial Instruments combines Dow Jones entity, sanctions and ownership data with BIGTXN securities mapping. BIGTXN also worked with London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) to develop the LSEG Sanctioned Securities Data File, which links instrument information with World-Check sanctions and ownership intelligence. BIGTXN also partners with Morningstar, which distributes and co-brands Sentinel.fi, BIGTXN’s screening engine.
Embedding the Answer in Client Systems
BIGTXN distributes data through APIs, XML, JSON,CSV and Snowflake. Direct clients can request a tailored file or schema. Mannan said the consumer can select required attributes, map them to platforms such as BlackRock Aladdin or State Street Alpha, all while BIGTXN assures and maintains the customised output.
Clients using standardised feeds still face different security-master, order-management and portfolio-compliance requirements. BIGTXN uses developers with front-office systems experience to map the data into those environments. Mannan said a straightforward customisation can take less than a week.
Controlled use of AI
BIGTXN’s core screening work rests on deterministic tools—machine learning, matching algorithms and controlled data processing. Mannan separates those functions from the company’s selective use of generative AI. “We are adopting AI, but we’re doing it carefully,” he said.
As an example, Mannan described an adjacent AI powered service, sanctions.com, that connects to over 100 regulatory and alternative sources and “aims to publish any announcement, in newsroom-quality English, within an hour of its announcement,” he said noting that “the service is targeting 50,000 subscribers by the end of 2026.”
Multiple bots draft and check each item for issues including bias and fidelity to the regulatory source. A gatekeeping bot reviews the complete content package before a human editor approves publication.
A Bigger Infrastructure Play
BIGTXN plans to extend and apply the architecture to the digital asset space and its regulatory surface areas, such as the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA), which regulates the offering of crypto-assets to the public in the EU and the request of admission for such crypto-assets to trading on a trading platform for crypto-assets.
This approach extends BIGTXN’s proposition beyond sanctioned-securities screening. The company is building a translation layer between regulatory restrictions and the systems that control trading and portfolio activity, with data quality and implementation treated as part of the product.
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