Waters Wavelength

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

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

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

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.

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

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).

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.]

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

This week, Reb and Tony talk about the internet and the problems compounded by AI. https://www.waterstechnology.com/emerging-technologies/7952665/the-great-disappearing-internet%E2%80%94and-what-it-could-mean-for-your-llm 0:00 – Welcome to the team, Mya! You can reach her at Mya.Jheeta@infopro-digital.com 7:00 – Reb and Tony discuss her recent column and the interconnected mess of a web of humans, internet, and AI

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

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

This week’s guest is Nick Kolba, CEO and co-founder of Connectifi, who joins the podcast to discuss the Model Context Protocol, LLMs and agentic AI. 0:00 – Tony and Shen talk about Astronomer’s ad campaign 5:30 – Nick Kolba joins the podcast 8:00 – Step changes or big jumps in tech 18:00 – Excitement for the Model Context Protocol 21:00 – Parallels between FDC3 and MCP 24:30 – Concerns around security 30:00 – Work that still needs to be done 41:00 – Code generation for “senior engineers”

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.

This week, Reb and Nyela discuss BNY’s digital workers and what the use of AI in society signals for the future.