AI Agents Gain Access to Sell-Side Research
I spoke with Aiera COO Gavin Skinner about how banks can bring research into AI workflows without losing control of how it is used.
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Hey, it’s Matt. I’m a former Bloomberg News reporter, and you’re reading AI Street, where I report on how Wall Street uses AI.
This week: Sell-side research moves into AI workflows, trading platforms open up to AI agents, and Citadel shows that even the most profitable hedge fund in history still needs more ideas.
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Sell-Side Research Platform Goes Live for AI Workflows
I was surprised to hear that across sell-side research, from the big firms down to the smaller ones, the annual budget for creating this content is as much as $6 billion.
That estimate came from my conversation with Gavin Skinner, former COO of Global Research at Citi, who said he managed a budget of $500 million a year at the bank.
Analysis ain’t cheap.
Since sell-side research is expensive to produce, the industry was reluctant to let clients and aggregators simply pull research into their own systems, according to Skinner.
Banks need to know how clients are accessing their research, whether they’re doing things they’re not supposed to do, like uploading it to ChatGPT, and whether non-clients have somehow gained access. And if AI is going to summarize or analyze that research, banks need to trust the output.
Skinner is now COO of Aiera, a company that’s trying to solve this problem. I covered Aiera’s Series B last year below.
The company, backed by firms including BofA, Citi, Deutsche Bank, Evercore, and HSBC, announced yesterday that it has launched a platform meant to give sell-side research a safer path into AI workflows. The idea is that clients can query and summarize the research they’re entitled to, while banks keep control over access, attribution and usage.
If a client is entitled to a bank’s research, Aiera can connect that content into approved enterprise AI environments through secure API and MCP connectors. Rather than having banks hand over bulk feeds of research, Aiera says its system checks entitlements each time content is pulled, logs requests, and sends usage metrics back to the research provider.
“The sell-side research industry will evolve dramatically over the next two to three years because of the advent of these tools,” Skinner said.
Aiera says it built the product with input from a buy-side advisory council of senior leaders from asset managers, long-only firms and hedge funds. The council is co-chaired by Steve Moreno, director of global research at Capital Group.
Skinner says the platform is also meant to help the sell side become more efficient. A lot of research production is repetitive, especially around earnings. At Citi, he said, 40% of the page count was previews and reviews, work that analysts were expected to produce before speaking with clients, even if clients did not particularly value the reports themselves.
I can relate to writing stories that you had to write but few people ever read. Back when I was at Bloomberg and covering companies, every quarter, I’d wake up at some ungodly hour to head to the office for 6:00 a.m. to publish an earnings story that 40 people read, in total!
Wall Street Opens for AI Trading Agents
AI trading agents are proliferating on Wall Street. This week, Interactive Brokers announced agentic functionality.
On Monday, IBKR added Anthropic's Claude into its platform, letting clients use text prompts to analyze their accounts and draft trade instructions. The feature currently only applies to equities and ETFs, and users must manually approve each AI-generated instruction before it is submitted as an order.
Last week, Robinhood announced that it will let users connect third-party AI agents through its MCP server. For now, the feature is limited to stocks and requires a separate account set up for agent trading. Unlike IBKR, trades may execute without direct user input on each transaction.
In April, Moomoo, the trading app owned by Futu Holdings, announced API Skills, allowing users to connect AI agents to its platform. The agents can analyze markets and prepare trades, but the company says users remain in control of transaction approval.
In March, Public.com started allowing clients to use AI to create trading workflows. This is not a pure bring-your-own-agent model: Public’s native agents run inside its own platform. The company says that once a user reviews and approves a workflow, its agents can monitor conditions and execute trades across stocks, options and crypto.
While the idea of using AI trading agents seems a bit odd now, the novelty will wear off as we get used to agents in other parts of our lives, like, hey, buy round-trip plane tickets to NYC if price falls below $X at these airlines.
AI tools are coming to a market where individual investing is already booming due in part to free trading and mobile apps. JPMorgan estimated that retail trading accounted for 20% to 25% of total market activity in 2025 and hit a record of about 35% in April of that year, Reuters reported.
Agents will likely accelerate this trend by letting investors ask questions about their portfolios and turn plain-English instructions into trade ideas.
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Citadel Set to Pay for Trading Ideas
I got a kick out of this story:
Ken Griffin’s Citadel is preparing to launch a new program that will collect trading insights from other hedge funds in exchange for a fee to feed into its own quantitative strategies, as the industry’s largest firms jostle for market data and more ways to deploy capital.
Citadel is the most profitable hedge fund since its inception, generating an estimated $90.4 billion for investors after fees since its 1990 launch, according to Edmond de Rothschild via WSJ. And still, it is looking outside for more ideas, because markets are that complicated.
This is also the logic behind Numerai, a crowdsourced hedge fund, where outside data scientists submit stock-market models and get paid when those models outperform. I spoke with founder Richard Craib in February after JPMorgan committed up to $500 million to the firm.
ROUNDUP
What Else I’m Reading
OpenAI launches Codex plugins for finance pros Finextra
The Hedge Fund Veteran Trying to Make His Past Self Obsolete With AI WSJ
AlphaSense Clinches $7.5 Billion Valuation in New Funding Round WSJ
Daloopa banks $47m Series C to scale data infrastructure FinTech Futures
Lloyds and Nationwide-backed AI fintech Aveni raises £12 million Finextra
Zuckerberg Wants Meta’s New AI Agents to Run Your Whole Business WSJ
Nvidia Introduces First PCs Designed for AI Agents WSJ
Trump Signs Executive Order Seeking Oversight of A.I. Models NYT
Wealth CEOs Tout AI, Tech To Bridge Advisor Shortage Wealth Management
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