T. Rowe taps Genesis, Cusip lawsuit, FanDuel-CME tie-up, and more

If you are a subscriber, you might have noticed that we’ve started to use AI-generated summaries. While they are are generated by an LLM, we humans are still editing them prior to publication. (Well, at least until we journalists are eventually replaced by AI.) You can see some screengrabs below, but we will only use them in news stories and long features; for the time being, they will not be used in opinion pieces, as AI isn’t very good at accurately pulling out pertinent details and presenting them correctly when it comes to opinions.

The reason we did this is, well, because subscribers have been asking for years for shorter summaries of our articles, which tend to run between 1,000 and 3,000 words. Even though we are the ones writing the stories and know the subject matter, writing these summaries is a pain in the ass…it’s donkey work. So much goes into publishing an article, adding in one extra time-consuming process—even if beneficial to some readers—was too much, as we’re a relatively small staff.

And that’s the beauty of generative AI—it’s an assistant that helps with the donkey work. If you have ideas for other ways we can improve both our summaries and our coverage, my door is always open to subscribers: anthony.malakian@infopro-digital.com.

Announced this week

T. Rowe turns to Genesis for corporate bond support

T. Rowe Price is using Genesis Global’s Primary Bond Issuance offering to address data management and workflow challenges faced in the corporate bond arena. PBI will provide the asset manager’s fixed-income team with a consolidated, real-time view of deals coming to market by aggregating data from deal information providers used by T. Rowe. It also has chat functionality and is integrated with the firm’s portfolio modeling and order management-related systems.

“The new issue application, built to our specifications and delivered through the Genesis platform, enables a scalable and repeatable investment process in the primary bond market,” said Dwayne Middleton, global head of fixed income trading at T. Rowe Price. “By addressing data fragmentation and improving collaboration across trading, portfolio management, and research, we now have a modern, integrated tool to view the market and assess opportunities with greater speed and precision. A particularly valuable feature is the ability to generate a composite deal record that captures the full structure of each transaction, which becomes essential during periods of elevated issuance.”

CME teams with FanDuel to build new prediction markets platform

Online gaming giant FanDuel is working with CME Group to launch prediction markets through the new FanDuel Predicts app, slated to launch next month. The pair say this will expand access to financial markets for millions of customers in the United States.

The app will provide access to sports event contracts across baseball, basketball, football, and hockey. In states where online sports betting is not yet legal, customers who are not on tribal lands will be able to trade event contracts on the outcome of sporting events. As new states legalize online sports betting, FanDuel will cease offering sports event contracts in those states. In addition to sports, event contracts will be offered on benchmarks such as the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq-100, oil and gas prices, gold, cryptocurrencies, and key economic indicators such as GDP and CPI.

“Our new event contracts on benchmarks, economic indicators, and now sports will appeal to a new generation of potential participants who are not active in these markets today,” said CME group chairman and chief executive officer Terry Duffy. “This launch will dramatically expand our distribution and reach, connecting directly with FanDuel’s millions of registered US users.”

EuroCTP selects BMLL for EU CT initiative

BMLL has been selected to support EuroCTP as part of the EU’s Consolidated Tape initiative for equities. BMLL will look to validate data quality control designs and calibrate the thresholds and parameters for those controls ahead of go-live, should EuroCTP be selected. In addition to providing access to its data sets covering more than 100 trading venues, BMLL will share its expertise to support EuroCTP in delivering a fully mature product by mid-2026.

FIA Tech adds to its exchange-traded derivatives offering

FIA Tech announced the launch of the third phase of its initiative to simplify fee and commission management in exchange-traded derivatives. The execution and clearing cost analytics (XCA) are available to clients via a dashboard and an API layer that can be integrated into execution and post-trade systems on FIA Tech’s Trade Data Network. The offering allows clients to identify and resolve fee and commission discrepancies on trade data, integrated into the allocation and confirmation workflows on TDN.

State Street acquires inflation statistics vendor

State Street has acquired PriceStats, a provider of daily inflation statistics derived from digitally sourced prices for millions of consumer products worldwide, sourced from more than 1,500 retailers. The vendor, which was founded in 2011, offers insights into inflation trends and purchasing power that complement traditional government indicators.

“Accurate and actionable measurement of economic activity increasingly requires the collection and analysis of large unstructured data sets. The recent period of rapidly changing inflation has demonstrated the need for near-real-time data, which requires a tech-driven, digital solution,” said Will Kinlaw, head of State Street Data Intelligence.

What you might have missed from us

Plaintiffs propose to represent all non-database Cusip licensees in last 7 years

While we don’t have an official “beat system” here at WatersTechnology, where a reporter focuses on a single subject like crypto, AI, or cyber, Reb Natale is our Cusip Lawsuit editor-in-chief. (Sadly, that doesn’t come with a pay bump, but it’s an interesting subject.) You can find all her coverage of the lawsuit here, but plaintiffs in the pending case against Cusip Global Services (CGS) and its affiliates filed their motion for class certification, which would define the types of entities and persons eligible to be represented by Dinosaur Financial Group, Swiss Life Investment Management, and Hildene Capital Management in their complaint.

Why does that matter? Well, if granted, the recent motion for class certification in the ongoing case against CGS would allow end-user firms and third-party data vendors alike to join the lawsuit. It’s also worth noting that there’s still a long way to go in the case, but the judge for the Southern District of New York has shown that she thinks the case should proceed.

Tokenization & Private Markets: Where mixed data finds a needed partner?

Tokenization and private markets have easily been two of the hottest topics our subscribers have been clamoring for information about. So I decided to mash them together for a column. Here’s the thing: some heavy hitters have been investing heavily in both tokenization and private markets data (think: BlackRock, but also Nasdaq, Deutsche Börse, and JP Morgan). Here’s what one CDO told me:

“It’s a massive, massive space. There’s all the money and buzz around AI, but there’s a lot going on here [the combination of tokenization and private markets], but it’s really its own thing. It’s not like [OpenAI’s CEO] Sam Altman and all these other AI companies are doing this in particular [tokenization/private markets]; it’s a secondary play, which is interesting, and why I think it has legs, because it’s based on stuff [DLT] from 10 to 15 years ago.”

Fintech proposes borrowing AI standard from autonomous cars

This story is a bit off the beaten path for us, but Reb spoke with Rajiv Bhat, co-founder and CEO of Martini.ai, who is urging industry practitioners to coalesce around a common language to measure their progress and understand their own projects and capabilities. The taxonomy he proposes is similar to the SAE J3016 standard, which categorizes vehicle automation levels.

“In driving, if you get something wrong, you run someone over. It’s going to be very catastrophic. In finance, if you make the wrong decision or buy the wrong thing, you lose a lot of money. And in that sense, there’s an immediate high-risk outcome that’s very visible,” he said.

Waters Wavelength Ep. 338: BBH’s Mike McGovern

I’ve been speaking with Mike McGovern—global head of technology engagement at Brown Brothers Harriman—for more than a decade about a range of topics. So it was only logical to have him on the podcast, where we talk about the importance of building open architectures, lessons he’s learned from implementing AI, and how his views on strategic partnerships have evolved. It’s definitely worth your time.

EY and Microsoft partner to bring agentic AI to risk management

Greek bank Eurobank and Fairfax Digital, the tech subsidiary of Canadian holding company Fairfax Financial, have launched a new agentic AI project with the backing of Microsoft, EY, and Nvidia.

Eurobank intends to launch an “AI factory, which will be an operating model focused on delivering end-to-end agentic AI processes, rather than standalone tools and experiments. “The AI agents being deployed go beyond customer service chatbots and single-use tools. The factory aims to industrialize processes across all core operations, those being: lending, servicing, risk and operations. The ultimate end goal is to seamlessly improve customer experience,” says Preetham Peddanagri, financial services technology consulting leader at EY.

In other news

‘Big Short’ investor Michael Burry to close hedge fund as he warns on valuations, Financial Times

The Big Short was a very good movie and even better book—I’d argue it was Michael Lewis’ last great one, but he has so many bangers (and I have exactly zero), so who am I to say. What I could never understand, though, is the media’s fascination with one of the main protagonists from the film/book, Michael Burry.

Every…single…time…this guy makes a “the world is going to end” prediction, everyone writes about it because he did, to his credit, see the subprime mortgage crisis coming when so few others did. But this dude has been wrong a fair amount since then. And his fund, Scion Asset Management, was managing less than $200 million—not billion…million—as of its last filing with the SEC in March 2025. (It was about $600 million, not billion, in 2021.) Most recently, he’s been betting against AI and, specifically, two of the major companies driving AI development—Nvidia and Palantir—and was saying there’s a bubble in AI.

Who knows, he may end up being proven right again. I’m no expert on investing in anything other than goodwill at my local pub. But I just find it odd that every time he makes a big prediction of doom and gloom, it’s the talk of the town because of the cred he got from the Financial Crisis, but no-one talks about his failures.

Well, as the FT article above notes, he has closed his tiny hedge fund. In his letter to investors read by the FT, he warns of the AI bubble, but he also had this to say in a letter he wrote to investors, dated October 27: “My estimation of value in securities is not now, and has not been for some time, in sync with the markets.”

I don’t know, I just find it weird how much clout he still has. But also, I can’t help but wonder if AI and advancements in quantitative strategies will not just kill off journalists, but also the “rock star” hedge fund manager…AI models are getting pretty good at spotting anomalies, right? That, or he’ll end up being proven right about Nvidia and Palantir, and I look like an idiot. Which I am. Don’t take investment advice from me. This was more of a commentary on the media.