Anthropic builds finance agents, Osttra buys HUB, TMX mulls extended trading, and more

The Houston Astros keep on losing players to injuries: Carlos Correa, Hunter Brown, Josh Hader, Tatsuya Imai, Cristian Javier, and a slew of others. Parents, teach your kids to love piano and not sports.

Oh, you’re here for tech and data news… right, right.

Announced this week

Anthropic creates agents for financial services

Anthropic is releasing 10 ready-to-run agent templates for what it calls the most time-consuming work in financial services: building pitchbooks, screening know-your-customer files, and closing the books at month-end. Each one ships with a plug-in in Claude Cowork and Claude Code and as a “cookbook,” or a curated guide for building agents, for Claude Managed Agents. The company says this will allow firms to do “real financial work” with agents and be up and running “in days rather than months.”

Osttra nabs HUB

Post-trade vendor Osttra is acquiring HUB, a SaaS provider of AI-enabled solutions that automate investment operations.

Hub was created by Man Group, Pimco, State Street, IHS Markit, Microsoft, and McKinsey to overhaul asset management operations. Pimco went live on the platform in 2023, but as WatersTechnology reported in March 2024, Hub had to lay off 20% of its staff.

Paul Taylor, CEO of HUB, told WT at the time that the vendor “continue[s] to review and optimize our business for opportunities to invest and bring our offerings to market more efficiently. … As we actively focus on streamlining our shared services while increasing focus on commercial, engineering, and technology roles, we are excited about Hub’s continued growth.”

The press release announcing the acquisition said that existing HUB customers will continue to receive support as it is incorporated into Osttra’s network, “offering enhanced connectivity and broader trade lifecycle services.”

After the completion of the acquisition, Taylor will step down as CEO.

Gresham, FundGuard partner

Enterprise data management platform provider Gresham is teaming up with investment accounting platform FundGuard, which will integrate the latter’s multi-book investment accounting capabilities with Gresham’s EDM tools. This will allow institutional investors, asset managers, and fund administrators to operate from a single source of auditable data across public and private asset classes, jurisdictions, and functions.

TT builds out FX offering

Trading Technologies is expanding its TT FX platform, which will include a range of new features for institutional, foreign-exchange, and precious-metals traders, providing deeper over-the-counter trading capabilities.

This includes extending TT’s FX product coverage from spot FX to forwards, non-deliverable forwards and swaps, and adding liquidity from bank and non-bank liquidity providers alongside previously supported primary FX venues and electronic communication networks. The vendor says this will provide a deeper liquidity pool and the ability to trade FX, futures, and precious metals through a unified interface with its execution management system, either directly or via bank algorithms.

TRG Screen launches contracts AI

Market data management solutions provider TRG Screen has released a new offering dubbed Contracts AI. The tool expands contract management within TRG Screen’s Optimize Spend platform, allowing users to analyze complex agreements and ingest usage rights, restrictions, and obligations directly into the platform within minutes rather than hours or days.

DTCC lays out tokenization service timeline

The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation announced new timelines for the delivery of the Depository Trust Company’s tokenization service. The DTCC plans to facilitate initial, limited production trades of real-world assets tokenized using DTC’s tokenization service in July 2026 and to launch the service in October 2026. 

The tokenization service will allow for the tokenization of real-world, DTC-custodied assets that provide the same entitlements, investor protections, and ownership rights as those held in traditional form.

LTX adds big-name banks to roster

Corporate bond platform provider LTX, a subsidiary of Broadridge, has added Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, TD Securities (through its subsidiary, TD Financial Products), Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America as fully integrated liquidity providers. JP Morgan and TD Securities will each appoint a representative to LTX’s board of directors.

“In a competitive market, we’re committed to supporting new entrants and fostering greater competition in the US credit multi-dealer platform landscape,” said Patrick Whelan, global head of FICC digital markets at JP Morgan, in the release. “Our collaboration with LTX leverages innovative technology to broaden investor access, enhance liquidity, and streamline execution—empowering clients with more choice and driving industry advancement.”

Marty Mannion, co-head of TD Financial Products, added: “We’ve been impressed by LTX’s commitment to deliver innovative execution and artificial intelligence solutions to both sell-side and buy-side participants. We are excited to enter into this strategic partnership and accelerate these efforts to drive greater efficiencies in the corporate bond market.”

Ion rolls out new tool for prediction markets

Ion unveiled its new XTP for Event Contracts offering, which aims to streamline contract creation, native event resolution, and settlement for event-based contracts. XTP, the cleared derivatives platform for Ion, is used by futures commission merchants for exchange-traded derivatives and cleared OTC workflows. This release will help with its push into prediction markets by allowing FCMs to process event contracts 24×7.

Wedbush Securities, an FCM and a wholesale provider of prediction market services to introducing brokers and market makers, has signed on as a user to support event contracts on benchmarks, economic indicators, politics, and sports. “In response to client demand and our commitment to supporting their evolving needs, we partnered with Ion Group to launch XTP for Event Contracts in under six weeks,” said Rodrigo Parrode, Wedbush COO, in the release.

What you might have missed from us

TMX to undertake extended trading hours in Canadian equities

On its earnings call, the Canadian exchange’s CEO, John McKenzie, said the exchange operator is “deeply engaged in a proposal” to authorize extended trading hours in Canadian equities and has been consulting with clients and stakeholders on how to get it right. The news comes after TMX Group earlier this year opposed a proposal by CIX Trading to the Ontario Securities Commission to operate with extended hours and fractional trading.

At the time, the Toronto Stock Exchange, which is owned by TSX Group, said that CIX’s proposal “raises fundamental market structure and regulatory policy issues that extend well beyond the scope of an individual marketplace filing, and if implemented as drafted, would significantly impact the stability and integrity of the Canadian capital markets.” 

If you have thoughts on this, let us know: anthony.malakian@infopro-digital.com

LSEG makes final case for dismissal of MayStreet lawsuit

In what’s been something of a tennis match with each side lobbing shots back and forth, London Stock Exchange Group has filed a final motion to dismiss a lawsuit filed by former MayStreet CEO Patrick Flannery, saying that his complaint is legally flawed and fails to identify any statement made by the exchange that constitutes fraud. Oral arguments on the motion to dismiss are set to take place on May 20 in Wilmington, Delaware. 

Spoiler alert: managing market data is a bad case for AI

Max Bowie had an enlightening conversation with a source at a brokerage that had recently undergone a merger. While the separate entities managed their data resources relatively effectively, when the two came together, the wheels started to come off. But in an age when artificial intelligence is touted as a panacea for all problems, it simply can’t replace proper data governance practices. 

Bootcamps and peer pressure: Goldman preps staff for AI future

Goldman Sachs has sent nearly half of its employees to AI bootcamps as part of a broader effort to drive mass adoption of the technology within the firm, according to Marco Argenti, the bank’s chief information officer. 

“I think what I’ve discovered with regards to changing the culture is that there needs to be, first of all, a top-down mandate on where to focus and AI needs to be seen as a priority for the firm. Otherwise, people will just go back to their comfort zone,” he said. “And there needs to be peer pressure, which is really your motivators, your advocates, your communities within the firm, or within any company. Basically, you create champions. The formula is: everybody needs to say this is important for the company. My CEO is very vocal about that.” 

Symphony introduces agentic workflows to core platform

At its annual conference, the messaging and communications platform provider showcased an AI agent studio that allows customers to build AI agents inside its messaging platform. 

Agents can be extended to Symphony’s federated chat offering, which allows users to communicate with clients on messaging apps like WhatsApp, while those conversations are captured for compliance purposes. For example, an AI agent working in investor support is deployed to a customer via WhatsApp. The AI agent can provide research and data as well as answer queries, all of which would then be validated by a human. 

A new market data hope or an expanding Empire

Tim Versteeg, managing director of APAC at NeoXam, provides some interesting thoughts as to how market data is now part of systemic infrastructure—rather than just a commercial product—and whether “market data is becoming too powerful to fail.”

People Moves: ING, ClearToken, HKEx, Trading Technologies, and more 

Our monthly report on the past month’s hires, promotions, and appointments around the capital markets tech and data space.

In other news

Sam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted?, The New Yorker 

If you haven’t yet read this 15,000-word profile of Sam Altman from The New Yorker, you’re missing out. Reporters Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz spoke with like 100 people to provide an intensely deep portrait of the head of OpenAI. Farrow and Marantz even had 10 face-to-face interviews with Altman himself. 

It’s at times funny, at times scary as hell, and always interesting and informative. And you might be thinking: What does this have to do with me? Well, if you’re thinking about using agentic AI, it’s probably important to know about the people leading it and how they think about the technology…and human beings.