Tony McManus, global head of Bloomberg’s enterprise data division, joins the podcast this week. They discuss Bloomberg’s approach to AI and GenAI from a data perspective, getting the infrastructure and architecture right to leverage these technologies, and the skills necessary for graduates interested in joining Bloomberg. 

5:30 – Tony McManus joins the podcast and gives an overview of his role
10:30 – How Tony keeps up with everything
14:00 – They discuss the biggest challenges from a data perspective
16:00 – What ‘data quality’ means
18:00 – Cloud’s role in evolving access to data
22:30 – Getting the foundations right
28:00 – How Bloomberg deals with point-in-time data
31:00 – The interconnectedness of data
36:30 – Skills and talent necessary for Bloomberg

Episode 284: Bloomberg’s Tony McManus

This week, Brian O’Neill, COO for transformation, technology & operations, and global head for group transformation at Standard Chartered, joins Wei-Shen on the podcast. They discuss a cloud-first and a cloud-value strategy, monitoring cloud costs, and maintaining resiliency.

5:30 – Brian joins the podcast and gives an overview of his background and current role at the bank
8:30 – He delves into Standard Chartered’s cloud strategy
12:30 – The cloud value framework
14:30 – Brian talks about managing multi-cloud partnerships
16:00 – Planning for disruptions
21:00 – The importance of an internal cloud services management team
22:30 – Optimizing cloud usage and costs
28:00 – Brian talks about some ‘no-go zones’
34:00 – Thinking about resiliency

Episode 287: Standard Chartered’s Brian O’Neill

This week, Tony and Nyela discuss Nyela's week spent in Boca Raton, Florida covering the FIA Boca conference as well as the current developments around 24/7 trading in US equity markets.

0:00- Tony and Nyela discuss the beginning of baseball season in the United States   
3:25- They discuss what happened last week at FIA Boca

Episode 309: FIA Boca

This week, SigTech’s CEO Bin Ren joins Eliot to discuss GenAI’s progress since ChatGPT’s emergence in 2022, agentic AI, and challenges with regulating AI. 

0:00 – Wei-Shen and Tony discuss their bar trivia adventures
5:30 – Bin Ren, CEO of SigTech, joins Eliot on the podcast
7:00 – Agentic AI
10:30 – Next steps in GenAI
15:00 – Is AI impossible to regulate?
23:30 – The understanding gap between tech and finance teams


Episode 310: SigTech’s Bin Ren

Brian Hyndman, CEO and president at Blue Ocean Technologies, joins to discuss overnight trading 

0:00 – Nyela and Reb talk about Reb’s start at WatersTechnology
5:00 – Brian joins the podcast and walks through his background and the beginnings of Blue Ocean ATS
8:00 – How market data works for BOATS 
9:00 – Obstacles for exchanges entering the overnight space
15:00 – Moving to MEMX Technologies’ platform 
17:00 – Competition from other ATSs
20:00 – The growth of real-time information and its impact on trading
21:00 – Misunderstandings about overnight trading
22:30 – Roadmap for 2025


Episode 311: Blue Ocean’s Brian Hyndman

Bertie Haskins, executive director and head of data for Apac and Middle East at Capco, joins to discuss the challenges of commercializing data.

0:00 – Reb and Shen discuss Reb’s potential as the next host
3:00 – Bertie Haskins from Capco joins the podcast 
5:30 – Four key areas around commercializing data
12:30 – Is the problem with how firms define the CDO role 
16:00 – Strategies to commercialize data
19:30 – Understanding the data roadmap
24:00 – Steps to create new data products
26:30 – Sometimes, a simple option might be the best

Episode 314: Capco’s Bertie Haskins

This week, Bitdefender’s Adrian Coleșa and Transilvania Quantum’s Sorin Boloș join to discuss security vulnerabilities in quantum computing

0:00 – Tony is back!
3:30 – Adrian Coleșa, Senior Security Researcher at Bitdefender, and Sorin Boloș, quantum software engineer at Transilvania Quantum, join the podcast
8:00 – How the partnership between Bitdefender and Transilvania Quantum began 
12:00 – Research into QC as a potential target
14:00 – Why attack a QC 
19:30 – Who bears the onus
23:30 – Classical and QC vulnerabilities 
32:30 – What is a quantum antivirus

Episode 317: Bitdefender and Transilvania Quantum

This week, Tradeweb’s Chris Bruner joins the podcast to discuss digital assets and fixed income.

0:00 – Reb is back in NYC!
6:30 – Chris Bruner, chief product officer at Tradeweb, joins Nyela on the podcast 
13:30 – Tradeweb’s history with blockchain
18:40 – Gauging client reception to digital assets
28:50 – Upcoming regulatory headwinds 

Episode 320: Tradeweb’s Chris Bruner


This week, Par Cassells joins Nyela to discuss shorter settlement cycles and the role of vendors in the transition.

0:00 – Tony and Nyela talk highlights from the Tech & Data in Financial Markets (TDFM) conference
7:00 – Par Cassells, chief client officer at AccessFintech, joins Nyela on the podcast
9:00 – Par’s takeaways from North America’s move to T+1
13:00 – The upcoming moves to T+1 in the EU and UK
17:00 – T+0 margin vs. T+0 settlement
20:30 – Difference between the transitions
24:00 – Vendors’ role in the T+1 transition


Episode 321: AccessFintech’s Par Cassells

This week, Riad Chowdhury, head of Asia-Pacific, and Dan Burke, global head of emerging markets at MarketAxess, join to discuss block trading in fixed income. Plus Reb discusses her recent article about Cusip and updates on the class action lawsuit moving through the courts.

00:00 Reb and Tony discuss recent reporting around Cusip and updates on the class action lawsuit
12:30 Riad Chowdhury, head of Asia-Pacific, and Dan Burke, global head of emerging markets at MarketAxess, join the podcast
14:40 Block trading in fixed income vs. equities
20:20 Drivers for larger-sized trades
23:00 MarketAxess’s Targeted RFQ
31:00 Challenges for dealers
33:00 Learnings from the equities world
39:00 Trends in bid/ask spreads for EM hard-currency debt
44:20 AI model for Targeted RFQ

Episode 323: MarketAxess’s Chowdhury and Burke (plus some Cusip updates)

This week’s guest is Brian Bejile, cofounder & CEO, Octaura

0:00-7:20: Anthony Malakian and Rebecca Natale, Europe Editor for WatersTechnology, complain for seven minutes about poor customer service and artificial intelligence.

7:20-35:23: Brian Bejile and Nyela Graham, senior reporter at WatersTechnology, have an actual informative discussion—as opposed to Tony and Reb’s diatribes—about the origins of Octaura, modernization of the credit markets, the platform provider’s move into the collateralized loan obligation (CLO) space, and the need for more data and analytics on the buy side. 

Episode 325: Octaura’s Brian Bejile

This week’s guest is Mo Rahim, group chief data officer at Standard Chartered, who joins the podcast to discuss data and AI governance and guardrails for AI.

0:00 – Tony and Shen talk about recent shows they’ve watched 
9:00 – Mo Rahim joins the podcast
13:30 – Understand your core identity
17:00 – People and literacy
19:00 – Get your data right
25:00 – Standard Chartered’s research, partnerships, and innovation pillar   
29:00 – Building AI in a safe and responsible way
32:30 – AI is your plus one  


Episode 327: Standard Chartered’s Mo Rahim

This week’s guest is Lior Yogev, CEO and co-founder at FundGuard. He joins the podcast to discuss legacy tech stacks at asset management firms.

0:00 – Tony and Shen talk about personalities
10:00 – Lior Yogev joins the podcast
12:30 – When does a tech stack become legacy? 
19:00 – How asset managers modernize their platforms without excess downtime
22:30 – Migration times
26:30 – Total rebuild vs. slight tweaks

Episode 328: FundGuard’s Lior Yogev

This week, Shen and Reb discuss a recent MIT study on GenAI pilots, and Reb’s recent story about ModuleQ dissolving. 

https://mlq.ai/media/quarterly_decks/v0.1_State_of_AI_in_Business_2025_Report.pdf
https://www.waterstechnology.com/emerging-technologies/7952681/fintech-powering-lseg%E2%80%99s-ai-alerts-dissolves

Episode 330: AI hot takes

This week’s guest is Bill Murphy, managing partner at Cresting Wave 
0:00 – Tony and Shen discuss System of a Down and Gorillaz 
6:00 – Bill Murphy, Blackstone’s former CTO, joins to discuss that much-discussed MIT study on AI projects failing and factors executives should consider as the technology continues to evolves

Episode 331: Cresting Wave’s Bill Murphy

This week’s guest is Val Wotton, global head of equity solutions at DTCC. He joins to discuss the necessary steps leading up to the T+1 transitions in the UK and EU.

0:00 – Reb and Shen talk about Reb’s time in upstate New York
6:00 – Val Wotton joins the podcast and discusses the metrics from US T+1
13:00 – Analyze the entire lifecycle and do your impact assessment!
18:30 – Considerations from Asia
22:00 – Additional costs to assess
28:30 – Balancing mandatory deliverables and T+1 work
34:00 – Tweaking CSDR rules
42:00 – Resiliency can’t be understated


Episode 332: DTCC’s Val Wotton

No guest this week, folks. Tony and Shen discuss recent books they’ve read about data and analytics, and…humanity.


Episode 333: Baseball, analytics and therapy

This week, Bank of America’s Ashok Krishnan and Duncan McInnes join Tony to discuss the build, buy, borrow strategy and instilling the right culture within the bank.

0:00 – Shen and Tony talk about the Risk Live Asia 2025 conference in Singapore
7:30 – Ashok and Duncan join the podcast
11:30 – The build, buy, borrow strategy
14:00 – Building a rocket ship
19:00 – Instilling a culture that remains
22:30 – Doubling down on the ‘Why’
28:00 – Managing tech priorities
34:00 – Dealing with data, interoperability, and tech debt

Episode 334: BofA’s Krishnan and McInnes

This week’s episode is one of those where Wei-Shen and Tony blather on about an array of things, including generative AI, cybersecurity, and Taylor Swift’s new album. Listen at your own risk.

Episode 335: Some tech talk...kinda

Over the last few weeks, the CEOs of several major financial institutions, as well as regulators around the globe, have been talking about tokenization, stablecoins, and blockchain. Wei-Shen and Tony do their best to unpack why this is significant. 

Ep. 336: Tokenization mania

Bob Myers runs Interop.io’s io.Intelligence unit. He joins the podcast (7:30) to explain what agentic AI really means (16:00); how the promise of agents could be good for interoperability between applications and systems (21:00); the hype versus reality of AI at financial institutions (25:00); an explainer of the Model Context Protocol and the need to avoid sins of the past (31:00); and what the industry should keep in mind when it comes to AI’s rapid evolution and the need to keep interoperability in mind (37:00).

[Editor’s note: Tony confused ChartIQ with Glue42 when describing the former’s origins being in Charlottesville, Virginia. He’s not the brightest crayon in the box…give him a break.]

Ep. 337: Interop.io’s Bob Myers

For the first 9 minutes, Tony rambles on about US elections…naturally. The good stuff starts at 9:30, when Mike McGovern, global head of technology engagement at Brown Brothers Harriman (BBH), joins the show. Over the course of 30 minutes, Mike and Tony talk about the importance of building an open architecture so as to better position the organization for “innovation enablement” (11:00); lessons learned and mistakes made when experimenting with AI and the importance of structured data (15:00); they delve into some of the reasons for why data management is still such a challenge (20:00); Mike opines as to whether newer, more sophisticated forms of AI will help fix those old data management problems or compound those issues (25:00); does he have any worries about the younger generation relying too much on AI (28:00); how delves into how his ideas around strategic partnerships have changed over the years (33:00); and some words of wisdom for vendors approaching BBH (37:00).

Episode 338: BBH’s Mike McGovern

This week’s guest is Jan Rohof, Asia-Pacific director of quantitative strategies and solutions at Northern Trust Asset Management

https://www.waterstechnology.com/emerging-technologies/7952654/northern-trust-asset-management-enlists-network-theory-to-construct-alpha-signals?ref=header-search

0:00 – Tony and Shen delve into two documentaries he recently watched

11:00 – Jan joins and talks about how he built a multi-factor model in high school

17:30 – The four Vs of data

20:30 – Efforts and resources required for good data infrastructure

26:30 – Focus on the economic fundamentals and reasoning

30:00 – NTAM’s research to implementation process

40:30 – Alternative data should be a misnomer

Episode 339: Northern Trust Asset Management’s Jan Rohof

The week of Thanksgiving in the US is one of the slowest news weeks of the year. So Anthony and Nyela Graham (who is subbing in for Wei-Shen) talk about the news media, instead.

Ep. 340: The sad state of journalism

This week’s guests are Michele Pitts, managing director and global product head of transaction management, and Marcello Topa, director for global market advocacy, policy, and strategy at Citi Investor Services

0:00 – Reb and Shen talk about the death of rom-com movies
9:30 – Michele and Marcello join the podcast
11:30 – Updates from UK and EU’s taskforces
15:30 – Applicability of lessons from US T+1
19:00 – How tech can help
25:00 – Prevention vs. cure
30:00 – Metrics firms should have
32:30 – T+0 is inevitable


Episode 341: Citi’s Pitts and Topa

This week’s guest is Sophie Lagouanelle, vice president of product for financial crime compliance at LexisNexis Risk Solutions

(0:00) – Tony and Shen talk about their Spotify 2025 Wrapped

(5:00) – Sophie joins and reflects on the state of financial crime

(14:00) – Volume and speed

(17:30) – AI and ML’s role

(25:30) – Changes within compliance teams

(30:00) – Focus areas for regulators

(40:30) – Shared memory


Episode 342: LexisNexis Risk Solutions’ Sophie Lagouanelle

This week’s guest is Jason Birmingham, CTO and head of global engineering at Broadridge

(0:00) – Tony and Shen reminisce on an amazing snowman they built 
(7:00) – Jason joins the podcast and explains the “modern CTO mandate”
(14:30) – The fundamentals matter
(16:00) – A platform strategy
(20:30) – Solving the ontology
(26:00) – The blueprint
(31:00) – Necessary skillsets 


Episode 343: Broadridge’s Jason Birmingham

The guys open things up talking about four acquisitions that occurred over the past month. Dan and Anthony first talk about FactSet-BISAM Technologies (2:50), Numerix-TFG Financial Systems (7:21), Broadridge-Message Automation (10:05) and Trumid-Electronifie (13:09). The conversation then turns to Burton-Taylor’s research on industry data spend in 2016 (19:09). They wrap things up talking about the NCAA tournament (26:15) and the upcoming baseball season (29:45).

Dan DeFrancesco's Album

Episode 63: Acquisition Analysis, Rise of Data Spend

Anthony and James discuss the trends that they think will dominate the headlines in 2019:

https://www.waterstechnology.com/data-management/4045791/the-best-longform-stories-of-2019

Artificial Intelligence (2:00)
Blockchain (3:00)
Back to AI (4:00)
Cloud (6:00)
Regulation (9:00)
Alternative Data (14:00)
Quantum Computing (16:45)
M&A (17:30)
Market Data Fees (22:00)
WatersTechnology (24:00)
The Best Longform Outside of WatersTechnology (28:00)

Trashed: Inside the Deadly World of Private Garbage Collection, Kiera Feldman (ProPublica)

https://www.propublica.org/article/trashed-inside-the-deadly-world-of-private-garbage-collection

Blood Will Tell, Pamela Colloff (ProPublica)

https://features.propublica.org/blood-spatter/mickey-bryan-murder-blood-spatter-forensic-evidence/

“I Killed Them All”, Jessica Garrison (Buzzfeed)

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jessicagarrison/martinez-hitman-cartel-black-hand-mano-negra-contract-killer

Inside Palmer Luckey’s Bid to Build a Border Wall, Steven Levy (Wired)

https://www.wired.com/story/palmer-luckey-anduril-border-wall/

Palantir Knows Everything About You, Multiple Writers (Bloomberg Businessweek)

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-palantir-peter-thiel/

The White Darkness, David Grann (New Yorker) — Great book, too.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/12/the-white-darkness

America Beyond Detention, Multiple Writers (Observer) 

https://www.texasobserver.org/america-beyond-detention/

How Goop’s Haters Made Gwyneth Paltrow’s Company Worth $250 Million, Taffy Brodesser-Akner (NYT Mag)

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/25/magazine/big-business-gwyneth-paltrow-wellness.html

Jose Mourinho’s Last Stand, Sam Borden

http://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/25145480/jose-mourinho-last-stand

Japan’s Rent-a-Family Industry, Elif Batuman (New Yorker)

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/30/japans-rent-a-family-industry

The Maraschino Mogul’s Secret Life, Ian Frazier (New Yorker)

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/23/the-maraschino-moguls-secret-life

A Kingdom of Dust, Mark Arax (California Sunday Magazine)

https://story.californiasunday.com/resnick-a-kingdom-from-dust

How an Ex-Cop Rigged McDonald’s Monopoly Game and Stole Millions, Jeff Maysh (The Daily Beast)

https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-an-ex-cop-rigged-mcdonalds-monopoly-game-and-stole-millions

Episode 149: The Biggest Stories from 2018

This week, Benjamin Quinlan, CEO and managing partner at Quinlan & Associates, joins the podcast to talk with Wei-Shen about his new report Beyond The Buzz. They also talk about the value of "innovation labs". 

https://www.quinlanandassociates.com/insights-beyond-the-buzz/

3:00 – Benjamin joins the podcast. He and Wei-Shen discuss “innovation” as a buzzword and what separates a good innovation head from a bad one.
8:30 – Then, they talk about companies such as Kodak, Nokia, Blockbuster, Blackberry, and Myspace that seem to have dropped off the map after being some of the biggest names in technology. How does this compare to similar big-names in capital markets? 
12:00 – Benjamin points out how the pressure to innovate can be a problem for some companies who are pouring money into things like “innovation labs” that are yet to yield much reward.
21:00 – As we are seeing more and more partnerships between cloud providers and financial services firms, Benjamin discusses what this means for cloud providers based in Asia.
26:30 – Innovation labs need to be more focused on one part of the business to add value across the whole business. You cannot simply use the word “innovation” as a remit. 
35:00 – In the fintech space, sometimes the hype exceeds the returns. Benjamin talks through his cynicism about buzzwords like blockchain and AI. 
38:00 – Each firm has a different set of needs. How should start-ups set their selling strategies to investment banks, asset managers, and hedge funds?
43:30 – Lastly, Benjamin tells Wei-Shen how he is continuing to innovate in his day-to-day and business life during Covid-19.

Episode 197: A Look at Innovation

Wei-Shen Wong and Anthony Malakian discuss the hottest financial technology topics in the capital markets every week.

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