MCPs in Data Management: A Fundamental Shift in Scaling AI
The breakneck development of artificial intelligence tools and applications is visible in the rapid emergence every six months or so of “the next big thing”. Generative AI was the big thing two years ago, agents were the big thing last year and this year it’s the turn of Model Context Protocols (MCPs). Attracting the “game...
Financial Operations Has an Invisible Tax Problem. AI Is Starting to Fix It
By Neil Vernon, chief product officer at Gresham. The financial services industry has spent considerable energy debating whether AI is production-ready for regulated operations. That debate has been asking the wrong question. Readiness is not the constraint; targeting is. The real question is whether firms have correctly identified where AI can address costs that have...
What Changes When 40 Years of Factor Analysis Takes Minutes?
What limits a research team when a piece of factor analysis that once consumed a morning of a quant’s time collapses into a single prompt and an answer? A recent collaboration between Axioma by SimCorp and the AI firm EDS brings the issue into focus. The answer it points to is no longer the cost...
NSCC Goes Live with 24×5 Clearing, Putting the Post-Trade Layer Ahead of the Exchanges
The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) has taken its National Securities Clearing Corporation (NSCC) subsidiary live with 24×5 clearing, extending the window from Sunday 8:00pm ET to Friday 8:00pm ET and applying NSCC’s central counterparty guarantee immediately to transactions executed across overnight sessions and multiple time zones. The change, which received SEC approval ahead...
FCA Horizon Scan Calls for Collaboration on AI and Programmable Finance Risks
In a first-of-its-kind publication, the FCA’s Emerging Tech & Research team has published Emerging Technology Horizon Scan 2026, setting out how emerging technologies could combine to reshape financial services, market infrastructure and the control environment that supports trust in UK markets. The report is designed to foster debate and encourage collaboration across the financial services...
ICMA and ISLA Push Basel III Debate Into Securities Financing
The International Capital Market Association (ICMA) and the International Securities Lending Association (ISLA) argue that US regulators should look more closely at how individual capital components contribute to overall exposure across repo, securities lending and derivatives markets in their Joint Response to Basel III NPR. The joint response uses two securities financing examples to make...
Welcome to Digital Assets & Tokenisation Insight: Tracking the Rise of Programmable Assets, DLT and Wall Street 2.0
The infrastructure that underpins today’s institutional financial markets is being rewired to support instantaneous transactions, always-on operation, hacker-proof privacy, and drastically reduced costs. Platform upgrades that leverage distributed ledger technology (DLT – including blockchain networks, smart contracts and cryptographic proofs), asset programmability via tokenisation, peer-to-peer transactions, and decentralised data, are being implemented to boost functionality,...
Continuous Trading and the Death of End-of-Day
As US equities and other markets move toward continuous, around-the-clock trading, firms face a set of infrastructure questions the traditional trading day never forced them to answer. A panel at A-Team Group’s recent TradingTech Summit New York was convened to work through them: how to build a resilient foundation without adding operational risk; how to...
SOLVE Extends Relative Value Analysis to Peer-Group Cohorts
SOLVE has launched cohort-based Relative Value Analysis, an extension of its pre-trade platform that lets institutional fixed income traders and portfolio managers measure a bond against a dynamically defined peer group rather than picking off comparisons one bond at a time. The release, announced this month, adds two analytical frameworks – bond versus cohort, and...
Bloomberg Brings Electronic Trading to ABS, Fixed Income’s Last Holdout
Bloomberg’s launch of an electronic trading workflow for asset-backed securities, announced earlier this month, lands in an asset class that has resisted automation longer than most of fixed income. The list-based process, now being rolled out to clients across the US and EMEA, is built around the Bids Wanted in Competition and Offers Wanted in...