Spotex and BitGo Partner to offer Regulated Custody and Prime Brokerage for Institutional Digital Asset Trading

Institutional trading venue Spotex has integrated with infrastructure provider BitGo to provide regulated custody to its digital asset customers via the latter’s GO Network. As a result, Spotex customers allocate assets held in regulated BitGo custody wallets for trading on Spotex while the underlying assets remain with BitGo throughout the trading lifecycle.

Spotex operates solely as the execution venue and does not act as principal to transactions executed through its ECN. This approach is designed to reduce the need to pre-fund the trading venue, improving capital efficiency, and minimising counterparty risk. BitGo’s applicable entities provide the customer’s custody, prime services, and settlement arrangements under the relevant agreements, including acting as a clearing and settlement broker and facilitating post-trade settlement.

For Spotex, the integration expands connectivity to BitGo’s institutional ecosystem and strengthens its offering to brokers, hedge funds, and asset managers seeking institutional-grade execution alongside regulated custody. And for BitGo, the integration adds another source of liquidity to its growing net

Joe Tuccio, who recently joined Spotex as Head of Digital Assets, says: “Having BitGo, one of the world’s largest specialist institutional custodians, as our first live digital asset custodian brings huge credibility to Spotex as we build out our digital asset offering and strengthen asset protection for our clients. By combining BitGo’s digital prime brokerage, custody and settlement capabilities with Spotex’s institutional liquidity and execution infrastructure, we believe we can provide clients with a more secure and capital-efficient way to trade digital assets.”

BSO Rolls Out Crypto Connect Plus for Latency-Sensitive Trading

Infrastructure and connectivity provider BSO has launched Crypto Connect Plus, which allows trading firms to spin up optimised cloud infrastructure in 10 minutes instead of requiring much longer lead times for manual provisioning.

Crypto Connect plus is aimed at market makers, HFT firms, crypto prop trading desks, digital assets platforms and liquidity providers. As well as the rapid self-service deployment, it features predictable ultra-low latency connectivity, a 99.95% SLA, dual AWS EC3 instances for resiliency and a real-time monitoring portal. Major exchanges connected include Binance, Kraken, OKX and Bybit.

Broadridge and Payward Add Shareholder Communications and Proxy Voting to xStocks

Broadridge Financial Solutions is adding shareholder communications and proxy voting to its unified governance platform to support eligible holders of xStocks, a leading tokenised equities framework developed by Payward Services.

“As tokenised securities continue to reshape global capital markets, investors should not have to choose between blockchain innovation and shareholder rights,” says Doug DeSchutter, President of Broadridge’s Investor Communication Solutions business. “By extending our governance platform to support xStocks, we are enabling eligible token holders to have a voice in corporate governance and extending our leadership in digital asset governance.”

Payward Services currently offers more than 500 tokenised assets across equities, ETFs and pre-IPO offerings, and with tokenised equities from several international markets slated to follow soon. 

Eligible holders will securely authenticate via ProxyVote.com using Web3 authentication, review proxy materials for the underlying securities, and submit their proxy voting preferences. The functionality brings established trusted governance capabilities that investors expect from traditional capital markets into on-chain ecosystems while preserving the accessibility and efficiency of tokenised assets.

Designed for interoperability across blockchains and platforms, xStocks move seamlessly between centralised exchanges, self-custodied wallets, and on-chain applications, unlocking new utility across trading, collateralisation, and decentralised finance (DeFi).

Bloomberg Vault Adds AI Models for Insider Dealing and Personal Trading Surveillance

Bloomberg has expanded Bloomberg Vault with two artificial intelligence models designed to identify electronic communications that may point to insider dealing or breaches of employee personal trading policies. The additions extend the platform’s surveillance coverage to two risk areas that can require compliance teams to examine communications alongside trading and account activity.

The Insider Dealing AI Policy looks for communications that may indicate the improper acquisition, disclosure or use of material non-public information (MNPI). The Personal Trading AI Policy targets communications concerning employees’ trading activity and investment accounts, including possible failures to comply with firms’ internal personal trading requirements.

The models join Bloomberg Vault’s existing suite of AI-powered surveillance policies, which covers market conduct, non-market conduct and conflicts of interest. Bloomberg said the expanded suite is intended to help compliance teams identify potential risks within electronic communications and concentrate their reviews on more relevant alerts.

Each model has been built for a defined risk scenario and is supported by documentation explaining its construction, risk focus and intended behaviour. According to Bloomberg, large language models are applied following model inference to improve the relevance of alerts and reduce false positives.

The documentation is also intended to help firms assess how the models operate within their AI governance frameworks. This is particularly relevant where compliance teams must explain the basis for surveillance alerts and evaluate externally supplied AI systems before deploying them in regulated workflows.

“Bloomberg’s AI-powered surveillance models have substantially improved alert quality and reduced false positives,” said Jotham Banyikidde, Investment Compliance Senior Associate at Impax Asset Management. “This allows our team to focus on meaningful review and oversight. Just as importantly, the models are transparent and well documented, which supports our internal AI impact assessment and gives us confidence in how alerts are generated.”

The release follows Bloomberg’s introduction of BSpeech, its AI-powered, multilingual voice transcription service. Bloomberg said the combination extends Vault’s AI capabilities across electronic and voice communications, allowing firms to manage surveillance and communications governance across multiple channels through a single workflow.

Comply Adds Kalshi Data to Employee Trading Surveillance Platform

Comply is adding Kalshi contract-trading data to its compliance platform, allowing financial firms to monitor employees’ prediction-market activity alongside securities, futures, options, cryptoassets and other investments.

The integration extends existing employee-trading controls to a market that may fall outside firms’ traditional personal account dealing programmes. Compliance teams will be able to configure monitoring rules and pre-clearance requirements, analyse trading patterns and investigate potential policy breaches through Comply’s case-management workflow.

The platform will ingest Kalshi contract trades in real time, according to Comply. Firms can use the data to identify trades that employees have not disclosed and assess whether trading activity conflicts with internal policies governing material non-public information (MNPI).

Compliance teams will also be able to document investigations, findings and remedial action within the platform. Additional controls include employee certifications covering contract-trading policies and consulting support for risk assessments and policy reviews.

“Prediction markets have grown faster than most compliance frameworks were designed to handle,” said Michael Stanton, CEO of Comply. “Compliance teams don’t need a separate solution – with Comply, they can monitor contract trades alongside equities, bonds, options, futures, and crypto in a single platform.”

The Kalshi partnership broadens Comply’s existing coverage of prediction markets. The company also monitors trades conducted through Polymarket using data supplied under its partnership with cryptocurrency tax and accounting platform ZenLedger.

Max Crowley, vice president of business development at Kalshi, said financial services firms were “navigating new territory as prediction markets become mainstream”. He added that the partnership was intended to incorporate employee prediction-market activity into firms’ existing compliance programmes.

“Most firms are still figuring out what a reasonably designed prediction market compliance program looks like, and that’s exactly where we come in. Comply brings both the technology and the regulatory expertise to build programs that hold up under scrutiny,” said Jamila Mayfield, Chief Regulatory Service Officer of Comply.

TS Imagine Integrates Prediction Markets Data into Risk Platform

TS Imagine has integrated prediction markets data into its platform, enabling institutional clients to incorporate market-implied event probabilities directly into their existing risk management workflows. The new capability allows institutions to evaluate how portfolios might respond to major political, economic, regulatory, and geopolitical developments, by mapping specific event scenarios to exposures and sensitivities across multiple asset classes. These signals integrate into stress testing, scenario analysis, value-at-risk, and sensitivity workflows, updating automatically as market probabilities shift.

Prediction market contract prices reflect the estimated likelihood of defined future outcomes. Used alongside conventional risk data, these probabilities can potentially provide an additional signal for tracking central bank decisions, economic releases, elections, and regulatory changes.

STX Deploys Eventus Validus Platform for Regulated Exchange Trade Surveillance

STX, the US-based, CFTC-regulated event contracts exchange specializing in sports, cryptocurrency, and real-world events, has deployed the Eventus Validus platform to handle all trade surveillance for STX’s forthcoming regulated market.

The integration allows STX to monitor its platform for potential market manipulation. Validus covers a broad range of suspicious activities, including insider dealing, momentum ignition, price ramping, layering, spoofing, cross-product spoofing, cancel-after-fill activity, and large order or trade anomalies.

Eventus collaborated closely with STX throughout its regulatory engagement, supporting surveillance demonstrations for the exchange. As STX works towards recognition by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) as a Designated Contract Market and Derivatives Clearing Organization under its XV Exchange and XV Clearing entities, robust trade surveillance will remain central to its platform.

FutureSports and NHL Announce Exclusive Deal to Launch Performance Index Futures

Independent index administrator FutureSports has entered into an exclusive agreement with the National Hockey League (NHL) to receive official, real-time statistics. FutureSports will use the play-by-play data to create rules-based benchmark indexes known as CME FutureSports Performance Indexes (FSPI), tailored to measure the cumulative performance of NHL teams and individual players. Subject to regulatory approval, CME Group plans to list monthly and quarterly cash-settled futures contracts based on these benchmarks in time for the 2026–2027 season.

The transparent, rules-based indexes will update continuously throughout games, establishing a new uncorrelated asset class for hedging and investment. Expected market participants include asset managers, pension funds, professional trading firms, and retail investors, alongside commercial entities seeking risk-management tools, such as apparel manufacturers, sponsors, endorsers, third-party vendors, and insurers.

To maintain market confidence, the indexes will be administered independently by FutureSports. While the NHL supplies the underlying statistical data and maintains monitoring controls alongside regulatory stakeholders to safeguard integrity, it will hold no involvement in the governance, calculation, or determination of the financial indexes.

AutoRek Acquires Fintech Grath to Expand AI Capabilities and Global Footprint

AutoRek has acquired Grath, the London-based reconciliation and regulatory compliance technology firm founded in 2019. The acquisition adds AI-driven automated reconciliation capabilities to AutoRek’s portfolio, serving banks, payment providers, brokers, and fintechs across international markets.

The combined organisation offers three flexible operating models within a single governed control framework. These include AutoRek’s core Enterprise Private Cloud platform featuring the AutoRek Intelligent Agent (ARIA), Grath’s Multi-Tenant SaaS platform for rapid deployment with FCA-aligned governance, and Grath’s embedded AI infrastructure product, Topa, which allows firms to integrate matching services directly into proprietary in-house systems.

This transaction furthers AutoRek’s global expansion by incorporating Grath’s client base in the US and UAE. The move follows AutoRek’s recent opening of a Miami office and senior sales appointments in the region.

Bloomberg Expands Electronic Trading for Australian-Listed ETFs

Bloomberg has expanded its electronic trading capabilities in Australian markets following a rule variation amendment by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC). Eligible onshore participants can now electronically negotiate Australian-listed exchange-traded funds (ETFs), alongside options and futures, using Bloomberg’s Request-for-Quote (RFQe) workflow. The first transaction utilising this new workflow has already taken place.

The enhancement replaces manual execution methods (such as voice and messaging) with an electronic multi-dealer liquidity process. It allows domestic participants to access both local and offshore ETF markets via a single, auditable platform requiring minimal onboarding. Additionally, the system integrates into Bloomberg’s existing EMSX and AIM workflows to assist with investment, hedging, and portfolio management strategies.

This expansion complements Bloomberg’s broader ETF infrastructure in Australia, which includes its BSKT creation and redemption solution. Together, these tools cover the complete ETF lifecycle, from basket management to secondary market trading.