Lisa Schirf

Launched 40 years ago, The WGBI measures the performance of fixed-rate, local currency, investment-grade bonds and comprises sovereign debt from over 25 countries, denominated in a variety of currencies. 

Tradeweb FTSE Closing Prices are expected be included in March 2025.

“The World Government Bond Index is FTSE’s flagship global index and a leading global benchmark for fixed income markets,” said Lisa Schirf, global head of data and analytics at Tradeweb.

“The inclusion of Tradeweb’s benchmark closing prices in FTSE’s indices validates our continued commitment to develop the next generation of fixed income pricing and index trading products for traders and investors worldwide.”

These benchmark prices can be used in index construction, as well as reference rates for a broad range of use cases, including trade-at-close transactions and derivatives contracts.

In addition to providing benchmark closing prices, Tradeweb stated that it plans to bolster electronic trading functionality for FTSE Russell fixed income indices and customised baskets.

For clients seeking to efficiently express a view on FTSE Russell indices and baskets, Tradeweb added that providing enhanced trading functionality can help efficiently manage what are often their largest and most critical trades.

“We’re pleased to announce the price source change within our global fixed income indices to include Tradeweb FTSE closing prices for these significant global rates markets,” said Scott Harman, head of fixed income, currencies and commodities at FTSE Russell.

“It ensures our indices continue to incorporate transparent, representative data sets across the diverse universe of fixed income markets that they track. Additionally, FTSE Russell’s benchmark administration of these prices brings a new level of transparency and rigorousness to the valuation of fixed income markets and our indices.”

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Lisa Schirf

As seen with existing Tradeweb FTSE closing prices for UK gilts and European government bonds, the new US Treasury closing prices will incorporate trading activity from Tradeweb’s electronic platform, which the firm claims to result in more robust benchmark pricing.

The new closing prices facilitate the calculation of bid and offer prices, capturing transaction costs based on executable pricing quotes collected via the Tradeweb platform. This builds on top of mid prices, which are produced for all asset classes.

The pricing data set features coverage of various of security types including US Treasury notes and bonds, bills, strips and Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS), with both a 15:00 and 16:00 New York snap time.

“As we continue to expand Tradeweb’s collaboration with FTSE Russell, our clients gain access to a broader set of benchmarks for use as reliable closing prices in their investment process and end-of-day trading strategies and other purposes,” said Lisa Schirf, global head of data and analytics at Tradeweb.

“We believe the Tradeweb FTSE US Treasury closing prices will serve as a unique foundation for the global fixed income markets and their launch further demonstrates our commitment to the electronification of the markets.”

The extension of closing pricing to the US Treasury market will help expand benchmark pricing capabilities across a range of fixed income securities. Namely, USB-denominated credit securities will be included, which are largely underpinned by US Treasury valuations.

The new methodology is expected to be incorporation into UK gilt and Euro government closing prices, including the addition of bid and offer prices.

 “The launch of Tradeweb FTSE benchmark pricing for the US Treasury markets, represents significant progress in realising our ambition to offer the financial markets a better, more representative solution for valuing fixed income securities,” said Scott Harman, head of FICC indices at FTSE Russell.

“We recognise the criticality of the US Treasury markets to the investment ecosystem, and the need to continue to offer innovative benchmark solutions to our clients for this important asset class.”

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Nicola Danese

Higher money market volatility as a result of revised expectations of central bank policy actions has led traders to increasingly reference spreads to overnight index swap (OIC) curves when evaluating pricing of fixed-rate repos.

Tradeweb claims to be the first electronic trading platform to make OIS curves available during the repo trade negotiation process, which will enable institutional clients to better assess the price competitiveness of different repo rates across different currencies and maturities.

“By linking our repo and swaps platforms, we are transforming what used to be manual, disconnected and time-consuming processes into efficient, time- and cost-effective digital workflows,” said Nicola Danese, co-head of international developed markets at Tradeweb. 

The OIS spreads are generated for all GBP, EUR and USD trades on Tradeweb’s repo platform, which will reflect the exact term of each repo trade, leveraging off swap curves on the IRS platform.

Following the execution of a long-dated fixed-rate repo transaction on Tradeweb, buy-side traders will also be able to manage their interest rate exposure in a fully electronic workflow, essentially helping to achieve straight-through processing alongside reducing operational risk.

Trades are able to pre-populate a corresponding OIS ticket with the details of their completed repo trade, including start and end date, direction and cash amount, and send a request-for-quote enquiry to liquidity providers on Tradeweb’s IRS platform.

“In today’s active rates environment, Tradeweb provides us with essential information for executing a fixed-rate repo transaction,” said Nick Sheffield, portfolio manager in the Money Markets team at Insight Investment.

“We seek out technology that can help enhance investment outcomes for clients and welcome innovations that support speed of decision-making and execution processes.”

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Billy Hult

The purchase price for the acquisition of ICD – an institutional investment technology provider for corporate treasury organisations trading short-term investments – is expected to be funded with cash on hand and close in H2 2024 subject to customary adjustments and a regulatory review.

Billy Hult, chief executive of Tradeweb, said: “ICD is an exceptional opportunity to acquire a leading investment platform for corporate treasurers, a fast-growing channel within fixed income markets and a strong strategic fit for Tradeweb.

“Acquiring ICD will further diversify our client and business mix, advancing our track record of expanding into adjacent markets to improve client workflows. As part of Tradeweb, ICD will also be positioned to drive the adoption of electronic trading for corporate treasurers.” 

ICD – one of the US’ largest institutional money market fund portals – currently provides its services to more than 500 corporate treasury organisations from growth and blue-chip companies across 65 industries and over 45 countries, allowing customers to invest in money market funds and other short-term products to manage liquidity. 

Following acquisition by Tradeweb, ICD is set to provide a comprehensive solution for corporate treasurers and asset managers worldwide “to manage short-term liquidity needs and FX risk, as well as optimise yield and duration via Tradeweb’s existing suite of products”. 

ICD’s products include ICD Portal and ICD Portfolio Analytics. The former is a one-stop shop for researching, trading, analysing, and reporting on investments, while the latter is an AI-driven cloud solution which is used to aggregate positions across a corporate treasury’s portfolio for analysis and reporting.

Tory Hazard, chief executive of ICD, said: “This acquisition will enable ICD clients to have integrated access to Tradeweb’s fixed income marketplace, while continuing to trade through our existing technology.

“The combined offering delivers even more of what corporate treasury wants, and together, we will be able to unlock the full potential of our technology.”  

Following close of the transaction, Hazard will report to Tradeweb president Thomas Pluta and join Tradeweb’s Operating Committee.

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As part of the deal, the fixed income platform provider will provide ETPs for the central bank and other Eurosystem National Central Banks (NCBs).

Billy Hult

The term of the contracts is four years with the option to extend twice for an additional two years.

Tradeweb’s ETPs will cover the trading of EUR-denominated bonds, US Treasuries, Japanese government bonds, USD- and EUR-denominated supranationals, sovereign and agency bonds and USD- and JPY-denominated interest rate swaps.

The news follows a similar win by Tradeweb in 2015 where it also secured the tender to supply ETPs to the central bank following a bid process.

“We are grateful for the opportunity to provide trading services and solutions to the European Central Bank for another term,” said Tradeweb Markets chief executive Billy Hult.

“We remain focused on continuing to collaborate with the ECB, while enhancing the trading experience for central bank and sovereign wealth fund clients across our platform.”

More to follow…

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For those of you that haven’t heard of it, RFM is a not-so-distant cousin of the request for quote protocol (RFQ). RFQ has cemented itself as a central method of execution in fixed income in recent years in light of the advent of electronic trading and the move away from bilateral voice trading and onto platforms.

RFM is a similar concept, also derived from a desire from investors to access as much available liquidity as possible to ensure order fills and achieve best execution. It too is a trading protocol used by traders to gauge interest from several dealers in the market at a time to achieve efficient execution of an instrument.

However, the key difference with RFM is that when using the protocol, a firm will ask for both the pay and receive price for an instrument. The bottom line being that it reduces market impact by showing two-way interest in a chosen instrument to hide a firm’s direction.

“As buy-side traders seek liquidity in larger size trades, the challenge to retain as much information as possible – while at the same time obtaining an executable price – can be difficult to navigate,” State Street Global Advisors’ head of fixed income trading, Sharon Ruffles, tells The TRADE. “As the fixed income market moves towards ever more electronification, RFM allows for price discovery with less information slippage.”

The two-way workflow is no new phenomenon to trading and is used in the execution of several other asset classes. Given the importance of market impact in fixed income, it therefore makes sense that the RFM protocol has seen a rise in popularity in the last year, particularly in the swaps markets, as a natural progression of the market alongside increased electronification. While not everybody is using it, it is growing.

As traders have increasingly begun to adopt algorithms in their execution workflows in fixed income, which are data hungry and protocol agnostic, this too has boosted the use of RFM.

According to fixed income platform provider Tradeweb, the trading protocol has grown from 19% in Q4 2022 in net risk terms, up to 34% in Q4 of last year. Looking specifically at G3 currencies [Euro, Dollar, Sterling] in the rates market, that growth story from 2022 to 2023 was from 17% to 32% – more than doubling in a year.

“Our functionality relies on dealer support for the liquidity to happen on the platform and dealer support really started to grow at the end of 2019,” Tradeweb’s head of European interest rate derivatives, Angus McDiarmid tells The TRADE. “It’s a growing interest for us on the euro government bond side. Whereas the government bond business has historically been very much an RFQ market.”

Market impact

When exploring why demand for this not-so-new protocol to the fixed income scene has soared in recent years, the same phrase is brought up every time: it reduces market impact.

“RFM was worth pushing for a larger in size trade to limit impact and limit dealers from being able to skew price based on knowing their direction,” explains McDiarmid.

Reducing market impact is central to the growth of RFM. One key client user group of the protocol is the hedge fund segment, and it goes without saying that hedge funds are some of the most impact conscious firms out there.

Many of these firms opt for two-way pricing to shroud their market direction and recent regulatory changes have driven a chunk of hedge fund flow that might’ve taken place bilaterally, on-platform. For example, thanks to Mifid and the push to broaden the scope of what should take place on venue, Sonia and Sofr swaps flow that might’ve previously taken place bilaterally now takes place on venue.

Tradeweb subsequently rolled out trading protocols for clients to engage with the Sofr alternative benchmark for US dollar derivatives and €STR for euro derivatives. Traders can use request for quote or request for market protocols and can upload Ibor portfolios into Tradeweb’s list trading mechanism for conversion into risk free rates.

Elsewhere, in emerging markets, where liquidity is thinner and any kind of inclination to trade is likely to be preyed upon, traders here have also typically favoured a two-way model both using voice and now, electronically. The result: a boom in RFM. At Tradeweb, around 67-68% of volume on its emerging markets platform was accounted for by RFM in Q4 of last year. 

“For dealers it very much replicates an existing voice workflow that they have been doing nigh on decades,” Tradeweb’s global chief operations officer for emerging markets, Will Tarr, tells The TRADE.

“That ability to conceal the direction you’re trading pre-trade and then only reveal it to a couple of participants post-trade gives clients a much greater degree of comfort trading that electronically.”

Tradeweb and the London Stock Exchange Group’s (LSEG) FXall launched a new FX swap workflow solution for local currency emerging markets in August last year. The solution links trading workflows in local currency EM bonds and FX swaps through a single user interface (UI). Using the solution, mutual clients of the pair can buy or sell an emerging markets bond via Tradeweb’s RFQ or RFM protocols.

Tradeweb is now working on building out its RFM offering in emerging cash markets in local currencies.

Using an RFM protocol also contributes, Tarr confirms, to better calculation of the mid-price in emerging markets trading rather than look at a static curve. Something that also translates into the rates space as well.

“When you’re asking for one side of that PV [present value] market, you have to calculate how much you’re being charged, what’s the real mid, is the trade PV accurate? It might be in an area of the curve where there’s not a lot of liquidity and granularity and you want to look at a truer TCA,” explains McDiarmid.

“It’s much easier to do that when you put two or three dealers in competition and it makes it much cleaner to assess the real mid of that trade at that time for that size of trade when you have two-way pricing.”

All of this points to RFM as a natural next step in the development of electronic workflows in fixed income. Dealers are becoming increasingly confident quoting two way on platform, McDiarmid confirms, and some of this is driven by transferable behaviour from trading in other asset classes.

“They can still show an axe and skew that price to a direction they want to trade but they’re showing an honest two way at time of execution for that specific size. I’m happy to pay here and I’m happy to receive that,” he says.

“A really good example of that [transferable behaviour] is where we trade swaps versus bonds in non-contingent asset swaps. Clients have questioned, understandably, why they can ask for a two-way price on the swap leg and have to show their direction on the bond leg? It’s about that consistency.”

Rates vs credit

However, when looking at other potential use cases for the RFM protocol, there remains some areas whereby alerting several dealers of your interest – using two-way pricing or not – could prove to be harmful for the buy-side. While the RFM protocol is having an undeniable rise to fame in the rates space, whether it will see the same adoption in credit is another story all together.

Read more – Tradeweb and LSEG’s FXall launch new emerging markets FX swap workflow solution

Many have suggested that the natural next step, following this sudden interest from the street in rates, is for RFM to expand further into other corners of the fixed income sphere, creeping into credit when used correctly. Here is where the use cases of the protocol and its usefulness in reducing market impact become more difficult to justify.

“There is absolutely a place for RFM in fixed income, particularly in local markets, but I think it must be considered carefully what the best execution method is for a particular bond as often the market dynamics or inventory and liquidity of the line don’t result in RFM being the optimal protocol to use,” explains head of European FICC trading Manulife Investment Management, Peter Welsby.

In some markets, regardless of whether or not you’re showing a two-way direction, thanks to the liquidity landscape, it becomes easy to work out a firm’s intentions. This renders a protocol like RFM potentially harmful to execution in some cases. And, makes it extremely important to pick and choose when you use protocols.

“Whilst in smaller sizes it might not make much of a difference, for larger-sized credit trades quoting a multitude of banks, using RFM is likely to worsen the pricing received,” Welsby explains.

“The client may think that they’ve hidden their direction, but often in credit it can be quite predictable which direction the client is. As such, rather than using RFQ with select liquidity providers with strong relationships and market presence to minimise information leakage, the client has shown their full size to a whole host of dealers. This could negatively impact the winner of the trade and evidently won’t result in better pricing in the long run.”

Given inventory restrictions in credit, it’s often more challenging for a broker/bank to make a two-way price if they don’t have the bond to begin with. In credit, it’s also harder to source bonds from smaller issuances than in the local markets and because of that dealers are more reluctant to reveal their hand without a strong relationship with the buy-side client.

“We would consider using the RFM protocol for trades that are normal market size and where the market is deep and liquid,” adds Ruffles. “Market makers will be less sensitive to the direction of the trade and potential for information slippage, and so they are likely to be more comfortable making a tight two-way price.”

RFM has seen a rapid rise in demand in the rates markets in recent months. And this shows no signs of abating given the expected central bank activity throughout the course of this year and the predicted movement in the money markets.

While some macroeconomic factors such as reduced central bank balance sheet could cause a reduction in liquidity that could see a move toward more bilateral trading to protect market impact, RFM is undoubtedly set to continue to grow.

Whether or not it ever becomes applicable to more inventory-driven markets is another question with a less positive answer.

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The integration of Tradeweb’s intraday evaluative bond prices will help better inform users’ trading decisions alongside unlocking new trading workflows for users of the Investortools Delear Network.

Tradeweb Ai-Price utilises proprietary machine learning and data science together with MSRB and Tradeweb proprietary data to price an estimated one million municipal bonds at or near traded prices both intraday and end of day with closing prices – addressing the challenge of price discovery.

These prices are now accessible on the Inverstortools Dealer Network, with updates made throughout the day.

“As the municipal bond market embraces more electronification and transparency, gaining access to quality intraday and end-of-day closing prices has never been more important,” said Lisa Schirf, global head of data and analytics at Tradeweb.

“By utilising Tradeweb Ai-Price for municipal bonds, users of the Investortools Dealer Network can optimise their trading experience through enhanced price discovery.”

Access to intraday pricing information via Tradeweb Ai-Price for municipal bonds will offer traders necessary data when making trading decisions.

The development follows fixed income trading venue and data provider MarketAxess expanding its integration with the Investortools platform for its municipal bond activity in June last year.

Read more: MarketAxess and Investortools partner on municipal bond offering

“Reliable intra-day pricing is an essential component of trade automation workflows and will allow our users to stay at the cutting edge of a rapidly evolving fixed-income marketplace,” said James Morris, senior vice president at Investortools.

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r8fin’s offering includes a thin-client execution management system (EMS), alongside its suite of algorithmic-based tools. In addition, it has a trading application to facilitate futures and cash trades

Speaking to how the acquisition fits into the business’ overall strategy, Billy Hult, chief executive of Tradeweb, explained: “We are developing an integrated approach to accessing the US Treasury market through multiple liquidity pools across cash and futures – and r8fin is an important part of that approach.” 

In addition, following close of the transaction, Tradeweb is set to “modestly” enhance revenue growth. 

This most recent deal follows that of Yieldbroker, which Tradeweb acquired for A$125 million last August.

r8fin clients include: hedge funds, systematic hedge funds, professional trading firms and primary dealers, and specifically specialises in US treasuries and interest rate futures. In 2023 its technology facilitated algorithmic-based execution for an average of $24 billion notional in US Treasuries and 375,000 futures contracts per day. 

Read more: Fireside Friday with… Tradeweb’s Enrico Bruni

“This acquisition is very much in Tradeweb’s wheelhouse, and we believe it represents a meaningful step forward in how electronic trading can unlock new possibilities for relative value hedge funds and other clients. We are also pleased to welcome r8fin co-founder Assad Fehmy to Tradeweb,” said Hult.

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Fixed income ETFs have continued to prove their worth as an extremely flexible product for investors. They’ve enabled market participants to transfer risk quickly, even when the underlying bond market is restrained. ETFs have several different use cases for investors, including but not limited to cash equitisation and tax management, hedging vehicles and lower impact ways to express short-term tactical views on the market. All of these use cases should continue to proliferate next year, especially as we see the industry trend towards a heightened focus on trading costs, the rise of multi-asset trading and the continued liquidity demands.

Steve Toland, co-founder, TransFICC 

Over the past few years automated trading has grown slowly in fixed income, but we expect 2024 to be the year when this really accelerates. All trading firms are looking for increased efficiencies, but many workflows have been seen as too complex to automate, meaning that manual trading persists in many parts of fixed income. This is no longer the case, as technology is flexible enough to follow any workflow currently performed by a person. Credit trading provides a good example of the benefits, where RFQ negotiation and trading can all be automated. Moving smaller trades to an automated process will improve response times, increase the number of trades dealt, and allow traders to focus on larger more profitable deals.

Legislation will also feature highly as firms prepare for DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act), where compliance is expected by early 2025. DORA applies to more than 22,000 financial entities in the EU. Importantly, it also applies to technology providers in the EU, as well as those supporting EU entities from elsewhere. The aim is to strengthen the financial sector’s resilience to technology-related incidents and introduces very specific and prescriptive requirements, like having robust measures and controls on systems, tools and third parties, and having the right operational continuity plans, while continuously testing their effectiveness.   

Vincent Grandjean, co-founder and chief executive officer, Propellant 

As 2024 unfolds, the fixed income market landscape is experiencing a rapid transformation, driven by both technological advancements and regulatory changes. A key focus in this evolving arena is the enhancement of transparency and the efficient utilisation of data. A significant development is the integration of unique product identifiers, marking a stride towards standardisation in market transparency. Yet, this contrasts with regional divergences, especially in the UK and Europe, where transparency thresholds and reporting requirements vary. Navigating these diverse regulations requires a meticulous approach.

The transformative power of big data is also coming to the fore. With an abundance of data now available, there’s a shift towards using these vast datasets to inform pre-trade decision-making, thereby enhancing market strategies and risk assessment. Moreover, as technology increasingly becomes central to data processing, the industry faces rising costs and complexities in maintaining such infrastructures. This has led to a trend towards outsourcing to balance efficiency and cost-effectiveness. Additionally, the application of AI in extracting actionable insights from complex datasets is gaining momentum. This trend is expected to provide a competitive edge in the market. Overall, the fixed income markets are set to become more informed, efficient, and dynamic, navigating this evolving landscape with a renewed focus on clarity and strategic foresight.

Venky Vemparala, global fixed income product manager, FlexTrade Systems

This year saw a rapidly evolving fixed income EMS space, and in 2024, we expect innovation to continue at a lightning pace. Over the next year, I envision automation as a central theme, with data and analytics being adjacent solid themes. The buy-side will continue to push for efficiency in managing their trading blotters. In turn, venues and platforms will respond with increasingly rich automation functionalities, each with a distinct set of workflows, which is where an EMS is now becoming a crucial tool on bond trading desks to aggregate. 

The buy-side will see additional value and optimise their overall trading workflows by opening the lifecycle of the venue’s automation via API and touchpoints to achieve more granular access and overall control of the automation functionality. In turn, venue and platform automation solutions will become more “algo” like with templated parameters, with the potential for common slippage and performance benchmarks defined and standardised in 2024. Alongside automation, the drive for sophisticated, actionable data will also be at the forefront of innovation, with deeply integrated analytics being crucial to assist with automation decisions and portfolio trading list iterations. It will be fascinating to see the innovation 2024 brings.

Mike Sobel, co-CEO and president, Trumid

US bonds recorded their best month in nearly 40 years in November. With attractive yields and increasing accessibility of the asset class, fixed income is drawing in a more diverse set of market participants. New interest players, such as systematic quants and retail investors, along with more traditional buy- and sell-side institutions are focused on the credit market. 

With alternative participants entering the credit space, technological advances, and the proliferation of market data, the tailwinds for the adoption of more advanced electronic workflows are giving rise to a new era of tech-enabled credit trading. Client interest in intelligence and automation is accelerating as tech-savvy and data rich users seek agile platforms that can rapidly innovate alongside them and provide the aggregated and customised insights that they need.

The credit electronification story is far from over. Greater adoption is creating a network effect – driving liquidity and the velocity of the asset class. Over the next 12 months, we therefore expect technology to play a greater role with intuitive workflows, protocol flexibility, and data-driven decision-making tools adding the greatest value to traders and investors.

The post The TRADE predictions series 2024: Fixed income, innovation and electronification appeared first on The TRADE.

The request-for-market (RFM) protocol will continue to be the next frontier for electronic trading in emerging markets. Having gained significant traction over the past few years, the protocol allows buy-side participants to ask dealers for a two-way market rather than a price based on one direction. The use of the RFM protocol grew from 59% to 71% of total business from Q3 2022 to Q3 this year, with the RFQ protocol usage falling from 41% to 29%, whilst the business grew by 92% across that same period. This is illustrative of the markets’ protocol preferences changing, and RFM proving its worth as an important tool.

Electronic trading protocols, like RFM, are combatting some of the challenges linked to trading in emerging markets, such as geographic fragmentation, less transparency in pricing, and language barriers. We’re expecting to continue to see an uptake of this protocol in local cash bond markets particularly, helping traders to tap into an expanding liquidity pool. In today’s ever-changing financial landscape, RFM allows clients to not reveal the direction of the trade, therefore minimising the footprint of their transaction.

Raquel Alves, global head of buy-side OMS, Bloomberg

Buy-side firms are seeking partners that can support their entire investment book and in 2024 we expect they will increase efforts to consolidate vendors and prioritise providers that can offer a comprehensive front-to-back operating model. Buy-side firms are seeking partners that can work seamlessly with their in-house ecosystems and can not only support their current investment assets, but also provide the flexibility and customisation opportunities to scale with them.

A major driver of this trend is the surge in complexity of investment strategies being utilised in firms of all sizes, whether from quant investing, ESG mandates or the diversification through alternative assets. Buy-side firms are also grappling with challenges around a complex market backdrop, the emergence of new technologies and an evolving regulatory landscape. Success in this environment requires solutions that can scale, flexibility in workflows, interoperability of services through APIs, increased transparency and analytics for portfolio performance. When buy-side firms narrow down their technology partners of choice, they will be laser focused on differentiating capabilities within these areas to set themselves apart and deliver alpha for their own clients.

Oliver Blower, chief executive officer, VoxSmart

In the face of unprecedented fines levied against investment banks for the misuse of messaging apps, attempting to ban an entire generation’s communication behaviour next year is shortsighted and misguided. The $549 million penalties underscore the urgency for a paradigm shift in risk management. Rather than suppressing evolving communication channels, banks must embrace adaptability. It’s time to recalibrate risk strategies to align with modern trading practices, fostering a culture of responsible communication and innovation instead of futile attempts to curb the inevitable evolution of technology-driven collaboration.

However, it is not just the WhatsApp issues that needs to be tackled in the New Year. It has been beyond frustrating that every man, woman and their dog have been fixated with talking about AI in the abstract in 2023. If you are a senior executive within an investment bank being bombarded with all this AI literature in January, where on earth do you start? Until the industry as a whole starts having a grown up, pragmatic and practical debate on specific use cases for AI in 2024, then we will continue to be left spellbound by grandiose and vacuous statements about how the technology is going to revolutionise capital markets.

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