Deutsche Börse invests $200M in Kraken, DTCC advances cloud strategy, and more

There’s lots to get to this week. Let’s go! 

Announced this week

SimCorp launches AI capability for stress testing

SimCorp has introduced a new AI stress-testing capability within Axioma Risk, allowing investment managers to focus on portfolio insights and decision-making. 

The enhancement employs natural language to design customized stress scenarios, identify relevant historical precedents, propose realistic factor shocks, and assess scenario plausibility, allowing users to focus on interpretation and decision-making rather than configuration.

Deutsche Börse invests $200 million in Kraken

Deutsche Börse has made a $200 million investment in Payward, the infrastructure layer behind global cryptocurrency platform Kraken. The investment was made through the acquisition of shares in a secondary transaction, resulting in a 1.5% fully diluted stake in the company.

The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter. 

Separately, Clearstream, a part of Deutsche Börse, has partnered with Ondo Finance and 360X to connect traditional financial markets with on-chain infrastructure built on public, permissionless blockchains.

In the first phase, Ondo-tokenized stocks and exchange-traded funds are now live on 360X, the regulated digital asset trading venue backed by Deutsche Börse. 

TS Imagine launches event-driven automation platform

TS Imagine has launched Automation 2.0, an event-driven trading automation platform that enables institutional desks to define, manage, and execute sophisticated rule-based workflows across asset classes from a single platform.

Automation 2.0 provides desks with a rule-building environment capable of encoding trading logic—including branching, fallback actions, sequencing, liquidity awareness, cost intelligence, and market calendar awareness—alongside a workflow engine that executes those rules reliably and at scale across asset classes.

L&G’s liquidity funds go live on Calastone’s tokenized network

Legal & General Asset Management has announced that its suite of liquidity funds is now available on the Calastone Tokenized Distribution (CTD) Network. 

The CTD Network, which connects traditional fund products with digital distribution channels, enables investors to access L&G’s liquidity strategies in tokenized form via a blockchain-enabled infrastructure.

Calastone, part of SS&C Technologies, provides the underlying technology for token creation, order routing, trade aggregation, reconciliation, and on-chain settlement functionality. Within L&G Global Markets, liquidity funds are available in US dollar, euro and pound sterling.

BMLL makes data available via Databricks

BMLL announced that its historical data is now available via Databricks. By launching on Databricks, BMLL enables a wider range of market participants to access its data.

A series of marketplace notebooks, created by BMLL’s quantitative analysts, allows Databricks users to discover and evaluate the BMLL product suite with minimal integration effort or costs associated with data storage. Use cases include execution analysis, research and backtesting, market structure analysis, transaction cost analysis, market surveillance, and risk.

DTCC advances cloud strategy

The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation has made new developments to its Cloud First strategy to strengthen the resiliency, scalability, security and speed of DTCC’s core and digital assets platforms.

DTCC is working with Amazon Web Services to modernize its core clearance and settlement systems and risk applications by rearchitecting them to be more modular, cloud-enabled, and resilient.

It is also expanding its partnership with Microsoft to further innovate and accelerate the delivery of its DTCC Digital Assets services on Microsoft Azure, which helps it design and operate digital asset platforms.

The modernization initiative includes incrementally migrating some core applications to a public cloud infrastructure. This will be the first time DTCC migrates critical market structure services into the public cloud. 

DoubleZero launches Edge for on-chain market data delivery

DoubleZero Foundation, a protocol that enables a global fiber network for high-performance distributed systems, has launched DoubleZero Edge, a new permissionless platform built to deliver market data in multicast format at institutional speeds. 

Edge brings institutional-grade data distribution infrastructure to crypto markets, with more than 350 data publishers and over 50 subscribers live at launch. The first product on Edge is a real-time feed of raw Solana block data. The platform is built to carry an expanding catalog of additional data feeds from centralized crypto exchanges, prediction market data, and order-by-order data from traditional financial exchanges. 

What you might have missed from us

SmartTrade eyes role as direct streaming linchpin

Direct streaming of client pricing for foreign-exchange and fixed-income assets through application programming interfaces is becoming the execution channel of choice for liquidity providers. But buy-side clients face a dilemma in connecting to APIs effectively. 

One way is to do it manually themselves, but the other is to adopt the third-party software vendor model to access aggregated real-time pricing from banks, with users paying fixed fees to the vendors instead of size-based fees to an execution venue. SmartTrade Technologies’ chief executive, David Vincent, sees the vendor becoming a key piece in this new market structure. 

How banks are utilizing new AI forms in their KYC process

The average know-your-customer review costs $2,274 and can take up to 90 days. Some banks are using AI to help with this. JP Morgan is building an agentic AI onboarding system to cut KYC onboarding times from days to less than a minute. 

ING and Standard Chartered are also revamping their KYC processes. ING has cut roughly 80% of manual onboarding tasks and is testing voice agents and agent-led mortgage applications, while Standard Chartered uses an AI governance “watchtower” and has a validation team that regularly audits tools, performs risk assessments, and implements controls. 

The rise of AI politics

In this guest column, David Hardoon, former chief data officer and a special adviser on artificial intelligence to the Monetary Authority of Singapore, says firms are now operating in the era of AI politics. If ignored, this risks ceding ground in a world where compute, data, talent, and energy have become fresh chokepoints. 

Data industry spend hits $50B for first time in new report

Expand Research, a BCG Consulting company, has launched a market data survey based on an updated methodology defined by Doug Taylor. The new report has, for the first time, found that industry spending on market data and related reasons hit $50 billion in 2025.

Morgan Stanley participating in Anthropic’s Claude Mythos testing

Morgan Stanley is doubling down on agentic AI. During the bank’s recent Q1 earnings call, CEO Ted Pick said the bank is already using client agents in its equities platform to answer technical and complex questions. 

It is also one of the select few granted access to Anthropic’s Mythos AI cybersecurity model, which Anthropic said could identify zero-day vulnerabilities.

Model risk in the age of generative AI

In other news

For Its Next Act, Allbirds Makes an Unlikely Pivot From Shoes to AI, the Wall Street Journal

Allbirds, a former shoe company, is changing its name to NewBird AI and pivoting its business to capitalize on the AI frenzy. It plans to buy high-performance GPU assets and rent out access to them. News of this move sent its shares up by 582%, reported WSJ.

This story has nothing to do with the capital markets—not yet at least, but maybe soon as the AI compute infrastructure takes shape. As someone who owns several pairs of Allbirds shoes, I am a little sad about the change, and I wonder if I’ll still like their shoes once the sale of their intellectual property to American Exchange Group is signed, sealed, and delivered.