At the close of the FCA’s systematic internaliser regime consultation on 10 September, two key stakeholders have expressed diverging views on the reform of equity transparency.
AFME is against reporting internalised hedging and venue attributed quotes on the consolidated tape; EPTA supports flags for addressable liquidity and a venue-attributed pre-trade CT to better represent the total accessible liquidity.
Alongside proposals to end the non-equity SI regime, the FCA’s consultation asked stakeholders for their views on easing restrictions on matched-principal trading by multilateral trading facilities (MTFs), allowing SIs to run organised trading facilities (OTFs), as well as widening away from primary-market-only how venues source the mid-price under the reference price waiver.
In the EU, following the MiFIR review, the SI regime is now opt-in and does not rely anymore on public systematic internaliser calculations.
In its reply, as well as agreeing with the ending of the SI regime for bond, the association representing European banks declared it is against broadening equity post-trade reports to capture internalised hedging or book transfers linked to delta-one exposures. It says this would artificially inflate activity and undermine the quality of the UK tape. AFME also opposes including SI quotes on a consolidated tape and cautions against narrowing how the systematic internaliser (SINT) flag is used.
AFME said: “AFME members fully agree with the complete removal of the regime for bonds, derivatives, structured finance products and emission allowances.”
EPTA, the European principal trading association, takes a different approach to equity transparency. It proposes mandated flags for internalised hedging related to equity derivatives to better report “addressable” liquidity and estimates that publication could lift reported volumes by 10 to 15%.
EPTA also supports a venue-attributed pre-trade consolidated tape and clearer automated/manual indicators but opposes restricting SINT to trades below standard market size.
EPTA said: “Our members see SIs as a positive construct which brings transparency, along with more formalized and democratic access, to bilateral risk facilitation.”
Both AFME and EPTA support allowing venues to source the mid-price data from a wider set of venues than primary only. They proposed enhancing transparency if order-level mid-point functionality sits on lit books under the same market identifier code (MIC). They suggest using explicit identifiers so market data users can distinguish execution types. Both associations agree with letting SIs operate OTFs, and lifting the matched-principal ban for MTFs, if consistent flagging preserves the distinction between on-venue, SI and OTC trading.
Lazard Asset Management has named Christopher Hogbin as CEO, effective December.
The firm holds approximately US$248 billion in assets under management (AUM).
Hogbin replaces Evan Russo, who will move to an advisory role after more than 15 years with the company.
Lazard’s CEO and chairman Peter Orszag commented, “We see this year as an inflection point for our asset management business, as we continue to build on our momentum and position the firm to meet evolving client needs. Chris’s leadership and success in growing a global investment business will help us to now accelerate progress toward our long-term strategy for Lazard.”
Earlier this year, Eric Van Nostrand was named global head of markets and chief economist at the firm.
Hogbin joins Lazard from AllianceBernstein, which by comparison holds a reported US$785 billion in AUM. He spent more than 20 years with the company, most recently serving as global head of investments. Prior to this, he was head of equities at the firm.
An AllianceBernstein spokesperson told Global Trading: “[We] will not be filling the global head of investments role at this time. Our public market investment teams will report to Seth Bernstein, our president and CEO. Our private market investment teams will report to Onur Erzan, head of client group and private wealth.
Earlier in his career, Hogbin was a manager at Boston Consulting Group.
Tipper has close to a decade of industry experience and joins the firm from HSBC, where she has been an associate director since 2023. Prior to this, she spent more than six years with JP Morgan Chase & Co as an analyst and equity sales trader.
Carolina Carloni, head of ETF capital markets, Eurizon
Legal & General Asset Management’s Carolina Carloni has left the firm to head ETF capital markets at Eurizon.
Italy-based Eurizon is the asset management company of Intesa Sanpaolo Group. As of year-end 2024, it held €394.6 billion in assets under management.
Carloni has close to a decade’s industry experience, and has been at Legal & General Asset Management since 2022. She was a senior ETF capital markets specialist at the firm before becoming head of the division in March.
Legal & General Asset Management told Global Trading, “The team will continue driving the next phase of growth under the leadership of David Barron, global head of index and ETFs. We will be expanding our ETF capital markets team, recognising the importance of that function as we continue to build out our ETF strategy, and are currently recruiting for a head of ETF capital markets to lead that team. An update will be provided in due course.”
Prior to this, Carloni was an ETF capital markets specialist at Invesco and a sales associate at First Trust. She also spent two years at LSEG as an exchange-traded product and open-ended funds product specialist on the fixed income markets team.
Susquehanna (SIG) and Hudson River Trading (HRT) have emerged as 2025’s best net improvers both in terms of volume as well as execution quality as measured by E/Q ratio (The ratio of effective spread over quoted spreads). Their January to July volume executed improved38 and 72 percent respectively to 10.4 billion and 9.9 billion, while they bettered their median E/Q by 39 and 33 percent respectively to 0.299 and 0.341.
Median E/Q Spread Ratio Over Time
In Global Trading’s expanded Rule 605 dataset, retail execution quality trends revealed a secular shift, with Susquehanna and Hudson River Trading edging ahead of rivals on key measures even as Citadel Securities retained its dominance in overall size and Virtu kept the second position in terms of overall executed volume. According to BMLL data analysed by Global Trading, lit continuous trading rebounded in July to 138.4 billion shares, up13.8% month on month, as volatility carried on contracting and the market buoyant.
For comparison, the five largest market makers as ranked by Rule 605 disclosures, executed the equivalent of just over 42 percent of this market activity measure with 58 billion shares traded. Citadel Securities once again ranked as the largest destination, handling 27.7 billion retail shares and producing about US$153 million in net price improvement, followed by Virtu with US$101.8 million improvement for 17.6 billion shares traded, and SIG at US$77.3 for 10.4 billion shares executed. The trio was closely followed by rapidly catching up HRT which provided retail traders with US$62.8 million improvement on 10.4 billion shares traded.
Jane Street and Two Sigma price improvement within the 605-disclosure scope totalled US$40.1 million and US$12.2 million respectively, while they executed 8.2 and 2.4 billion shares respectively. The former, Jane Street, is the only market maker to have seen its E/Q ratio degrade (higher is worse) this year going from 0.515 in January to 0.535 in July.
Previous academic studies have shown that changes in execution quality ranking can be interpreted as a clear push to gain market shares in the retail execution space by market makers. This may have occurred in 2025 with SIG and HRT; HRT declined to comment and SIG did not reply to a request for comments.
Sources have confirmed to us that HRT surpassed Citadel Securities in overall Q2 2025 trading revenues at US$2.6 billion over the latter US$2.4 billion revenue. They both were still far behind Jane Street at US$10.1 billion trading revenue for Q2 2025.
Further support for this explanation lies in the analysis of the competitive dynamics in market making across common tickers. In July, on the securities where multiple market makers were active, Susquehanna’s median E/Q outperformed Citadel Securities by 11 basis points, while HRT bettered Jane Street by roughly 19 basis points: The gains are not solely the product of trading in “easier” or different names but reflect a genuine better execution quality.
Having run regressions against the unique features of the Rule 605 disclosure datasets we understand that order type mix and time to execution mix are also big drivers of the overall execution quality offered by market makers. The interactive chart below shows that order type is strongly correlated with E/Q spread level.
The very differentiated composition of shares executed, orders internalised by types suggests further specialisation by market makers and the corresponding routing choices made by retail brokers. These dynamics might become clearer with the adoption of the enhanced Rule 605 disclosures.
RBC Capital Markets has named Gaurika Gambhir as a managing director and head of equity derivative flow sales for the EMEA region as it expands its global equities franchise.
Based in London, Gambhir reports to EMEA head of global markets flow sales Janet Wilkinson. She is responsible for expanding the firm’s equity derivatives offerings.
Also joining the London office is Sunny Dhonsi, who has been appointed director and head of EMEA equity SS flow derivatives trading. He reports locally to Akilesh Eswaram, global head of QIS and EMEA head of equity trading, and broadly to David Lalonde and Chad Blank, global co-heads of flow trading.
RBC Capital Markets reported CAD $1.3 billion in net income for the three months to August, up 13% year-on-year and up 10% quarter-on-quarter.
Earlier this month, European equity sales trader Jonathan West left the firm.
Wilkinson and Eswaran commented, “These key hires represent a significant step forward in our strategic ambition to build a world-class equities platform. With Sunny’s and Gaurika’s leadership, we are well-positioned to deliver innovative solutions, deepen client engagement, and drive growth in the equity derivatives space.”
Gambhir has more than 20 years of industry experience and joins RBC from HSBC, where she was head of UK equity derivatives sales.
Dhonsi’s more than 25-year career includes a decade at JP Morgan as an equity derivatives trader. Most recently, he was a portfolio manager at Squarepoint Capital.
Fabiana Fedeli, chief investment officer for equities, multi-asset and sustainability, M&G Investments
The unbundled research model is alive and well according to M&G Investments. But with an influx of information, the fund manager is turning to a vendor to help make sense of it all.
This week, the fund manager – which holds £315 billion in assets under management globally – announced that it would be using Bloomberg’s Research Management Solutions (RMS Enterprise) to generate and distribute research insights faster. The two companies collaborated on the service’s development.
In the unbundled model, trading and research costs are separated, with the latter paid for by the company’s own resources. Initially mandated by MiFID II, in December 2024 the Listing Act rolled back the requirement and allowed research to be rebundled effective 5 June 2026.
Fabiana Fedeli, chief investment officer for equities, multi-asset and sustainability at M&G Investments, told Global Trading, “We pay and reward our providers using our own resources. In line with MIFID II, we are not allowed to reward third party research by allocating trades. We do perform a qualitative review on our third-party providers twice a year.”
Explaining how the firm structures its third-party research, she continued: “We have a list of approved providers that we consume from and our systems track our third-party research use as well as any unsolicited research offers. We have a dedicated team managing those provider relationships.”
M&G also generates its own research internally.
“Our analysts are evaluated based on the impact of their research on the investment outcomes. Such valuation also includes considerations such as quality of output, knowledge sharing and integration of sustainability considerations,” Fedeli said.
Through RMS Enterprise, M&G’s investment team will be able to combine the firm’s proprietary research with Bloomberg’s research library and market data.
The company states that this will improve research process consistency across its global locations, in addition to improving cross-asset insights and collaboration across teams.
Fedeli observed, “For active asset managers such as M&G, in-depth proprietary research represents a foundational tool to generate new investment opportunities globally and across all asset classes.”
RMS Enterprise also includes a system administration suite that can be used to accelerate research publication, integrating into M&G’s in-house systems to provide market data and internal content templates.
Chuck Mack, senior president of North American markets, Nasdaq
Following the wave of retail interest in digital assets, but seeking to address industry concerns about weak regulation, Nasdaq has issued a proposal for tokenised securities to be traded with tight regulatory safeguards.
The document, submitted to the SEC yesterday, calls for Nasdaq’s member firms and investors to be allowed to tokenise and trade equity securities and exchange-traded products (ETPs) on Nasdaq’s markets.
Chuck Mack, senior president of North American markets, stated, “Our goal is to integrate digital assets into Nasdaq’s current infrastructure and systems, which will advance financial innovation while maintaining stability, fairness, and investor protection.”
Tokenised securities are a growing market presence, and one that has shaky regulatory oversight. Last month, the World Federation of Exchanges called for the SEC to crack down on third-party tokenised US equities, which it calls “mimicked” products.
“Even though they’re marketed as stock tokens and may seem like stocks, they are not stocks,” the group explained. These tokens are closer to derivatives, it added.
Among the group’s concerns with such products are the risk of liquidity fragmentation, with third-party tokenised equities pulling liquidity from traditional exchanges, and exploitation of gaps in regulation that haven’t caught up to the blockchain frenzy. The WFE also noted that retail investors may not have the same shareholder rights with tokensied equities that they would with their traditional counterparts, highlighting a lack of clarity around ownership.
Nandini Sukumar, WFE CEO, commented, “What we are seeing is a blatant attempt to circumvent regulation, with some firms seeking “no action” relief from regulators or deliberately operating through legal grey areas. Investor protection must remain paramount, and regulation must evolve to ensure that new technologies are not used as a mask for risk and opacity.”
In its SEC filing, Nasdaq recognised this issue. “In Europe, trading of tokenised stocks is occurring in a manner that raises numerous concerns,” it said.
“For example, we understand that some digital asset trading platforms are offering shares of US equities to European investors without the prior knowledge or consent of the issuers of those securities.”
If Nasdaq’s plans are approved, once an order is entered on the exchange, participants will be given the choice between clearing in a regular or tokenised form. In both formats, securities will be subject to the same order entry and execution rules and will share a market identification number when sent to the Depository Trust Corporation (DTC) for clearing and settlement.
Nasdaq’s Mack stressed that the exchange’s trading of tokenised securities is in line with federal SEC regulations ensuring fair and orderly trading.
“That’s a key point we make in our filing: the U.S. has existing rules that don’t preclude different types of representation of a security. If you’re trading a stock and we’re having DTC tokenise it after the trade, then nothing is different from the perspective of how the market functions, how you trade, how you get your best execution, or how you buy or sell on your trading platform,” he said.
“Past market failures teach us that it is imperative to ensure governance, resilience, and investor protection are embedded from the outset.”
Institutional asset owners are sitting on vast troves of data – but extracting value from that data is more challenging than ever.
In addition to the traditional asset classes of equities and fixed income, many pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, and endowments are moving into less liquid and transparent markets such as private assets, and they may also need to manage under an environmental, social and governance (ESG) framework, both of which have their own unique data considerations.
Elaine Tan, BNP Paribas.
“It’s very important for asset owners to improve their ability to manage a vast variety of datasets in a timely and cost-effective manner, in order to make better investment decisions,” said Elaine Tan, Head of Asset Owners & Asset Managers Client Lines for Asia Pacific, Securities Services, at BNP Paribas. “This is not a simple task.”
Tan also highlighted some of the key aspects to asset owners’ data challenge: the lack of standardisation and uniformity to the data; fragmentation of data source across platforms, systems, service providers, and locations; and the increasingly complex and dynamic regulations across markets and geographies.
The implication of getting data right goes beyond investment decisions. “Inaccurate or incomplete data will limit asset owners’ ability to manage various risks, such as climate related risk, cybersecurity risk, market volatility and so on,” Tan said. “Comprehensive and timely data is needed to identify, assess, and mitigate these risks effectively.”
More rigour needed While market participants have been testing various data-driven solutions to improve operational efficiency, the overall industry agrees that a more rigorous approach in using data is needed in order to generate new ideas.
“In the past, asset owners focused only on collecting basic financial data for performance measurement or regulatory compliance,” Tan said. “This historical data was often presented in a static format. This is no longer sufficient, and client need real-time and flexible data to support decision making and risk management.”
Asset owners are increasingly focusing on leveraging technology, not only for meeting reporting requirements, but also improving overall operations and data quality. “Leading institutions have invested in modernising and future-proofing their IT foundation, upgrading core investment platforms, and deploying AI tools to improve data processes,” according to a McKinsey report, published in January 2025. “They have also made data a strategic asset instead of being merely a by-product of operations.”
The McKinsey report suggested that institutional investors’ effective deployment of technology and AI could generate a return on investment (ROI) of more than tenfold across three domains: investment returns, operational efficiency, and risk management.
Data quality Tan noted asset owners are deploying artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies to extract more value from data and also using data management platforms to automate complex workflows, enhance data accuracy, and improve operational efficiency. “Advanced technology can identify inconsistencies and discrepancies in the data, and it can apply predefined rules to clean, standardise, and improve the quality of the data,” she said.
Facing a complex geo-political environment, Asset Owners are contemplating how technology and service providers can support them in defining a comprehensive, total portfolio approach across all asset classes, this presents a great opportunity for technology and service providers to raise the bar on data suites with customised, flexible solutions. For example, UniSuper, one of Australia’s largest superannuation funds, recently partnered with BNP Paribas’ Securities Services business to leverage Data PRISM360 solution, powered by NeoXam technology, to implement some data management uses cases.
“Data PRISM360 is a centralised platform that will help UniSuper tackle key investment data challenges,” Tan said. “It streamlines data management processes, with strong data quality and data enrichment processes to provide a unified view across multiple assets and across the investment structure, which helps the asset owner manage their investment data more effectively. The solution targets to enhances reporting capabilities and offer advanced analytics, including financial metrics and ESG factors,”
Regarding ESG, BNP Paribas’s 2025 Survey suggested that 79 percent of APAC institutional investors are integrating ESG criteria in their investment decision making, and 60 percent of APAC investors cited “ESG/sustainability data and research and challenges as the biggest obstacle to deploying capital into these investments.”
Specific challenges pertinent to ESG data include a lack of standardisation in performance and reporting metrics, as well as uneven consistency and reliability in the data, according to Tan. The survey numbers “highlight the critical need for improvement in ESG data collection, standardisation, and harmonisation,” Tan said. “This will facilitate better analysis and more effective sustainable investing.”
Looking ahead: The future of data management As asset owners continue to evolve their data strategies, the role of technology and service providers will become increasingly crucial in navigating the complexities of modern investment landscapes. Data management solutions will become instrumental in the way that Asset Owners master the monitoring and adjustment of their strategic asset allocation. By leveraging advanced technologies, standardising data practices, and partnering with specialised service providers, asset owners can unlock new levels of efficiency, risk management, and investment performance. This ongoing evolution will not only benefit the asset owners but also the individual investors whose futures depend on these strategic decisions.
Daniel Gamba, chief commercial officer, Franklin Templeton
Former Northern Trust president of asset management Daniel Gamba has joined Franklin Templeton as chief commercial officer, effective 15 October.
Based in New York, Gamba will oversee global sales, marketing and product strategy. He reports to Jenny Johnson, CEO, and replaces Adam Spector, who spent five years with the company.
Franklin Templeton reported US$1.6 trillion in assets under management (AUM) as of 30 June, up 2% year-on-year (YoY). Net income was down 47% YoY at the end of the second quarter, reaching a reported US$92.3 million.
Alongside Gamba, Franklin Templeton has promoted Terrence Murphy, head of public market investments, and Matthew Nicholls, chief financial and operating officer, to co-presidents.
Gamba has almost 25 years of industry experience, the bulk of which has been spent with BlackRock. He held a number of senior roles at the firm, including co-head of fundamental equities, global head of active equity product strategy and US co-head of iShares.
Prior to this, he was at Barclays Asset Management (before its acquisition by BlackRock) as director of global strategy and, later, CEO for LatAm and the Caribbean.
At Northern Trust Asset Management, which holds a reported US$1.7 trillion in AUM, Gamba is replaced by Michael Hunstad.
Hunstad has been with NTAM since 2012, and was promoted from global co-chief investment officer.
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