Nasdaq Calypso launches agentic AI across trade lifecycle

The New York-headquartered exchange group on Tuesday launched an agentic AI operating environment within its Calypso platform, allowing financial institutions to deploy and connect AI agents across the trade lifecycle.

“For institutions to adopt AI agents at scale, they need a trusted, governed infrastructure inside the capital market platforms they already run, a place to connect agents from many different sources to real workflows, data, and controls,” said Magnus Haglind, head of capital markets technology at Nasdaq, in a release.

Haglind added: “By integrating agentic capabilities and serving as the orchestration layer, we are evolving Nasdaq Calypso from a system of record into an intelligent platform that automates activity at every stage of the trade lifecycle.”

The framework will provide an environment for banks, brokers, asset managers, central banks and other financial institutions to use AI agents with Nasdaq Calypso's system-of-record trading, risk and collateral data.

Clients will also be able to connect their own AI infrastructure through an integrated layer based on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a standard for connecting AI agents to software.

The launch comes after HSBC on Monday adopted Nasdaq Calypso for its exchange-traded derivatives clearing platform, bringing its ETD and over-the-counter derivatives clearing capabilities onto the technology. HSBC said the platform would support cross-margining and real-time monitoring of clearing activity, margin, collateral and risk as the bank prepares for extended market hours and growing demand for tokenised collateral.

Nasdaq targets post-trade automation

Nasdaq said the technology could be used to automate processes across capital markets, including improving risk controls, reducing settlement failures and turning operational data into automated actions.

The launch comes as financial institutions look to reduce manual intervention in post-trade and clearing processes. A recent Nasdaq and Acuiti survey found almost half of respondents identified manual intervention as a challenge within their post-trade operations, while 56% said they risked losing ground to competitors if they failed to integrate AI or machine learning into clearing operations.

The first capabilities available through the new environment include a natural-language assistant that allows users to query Calypso data, documentation and other information.

Nasdaq plans to introduce additional governed AI agents, described by the exchange operator as “agentic workers”, aimed at reducing manual processes across capital markets workflows.

Agents will operate on core Calypso trading, risk and collateral records and can also be extended to other enterprise, market and reference data sources.

Clients will retain control of their data, while the agents will be hosted by Nasdaq and delivered through Calypso's cloud environment, which is built on Amazon Bedrock. On-premises Calypso clients will also be able to connect to the agents.

Nasdaq said it will work with individual institutions on their internal AI governance and control requirements as they adopt the new capabilities.

The launch expands Nasdaq's use of AI across its financial technology business, which already includes agentic AI capabilities within Nasdaq Verafin and AI-powered regulatory reporting through Nasdaq AxiomSL.

Nasdaq Ventures also invested in enterprise AI firm Transient.AI earlier this month, which develops infrastructure for deploying AI agents within controlled environments across financial markets. Nasdaq said at the time that Transient's ability to embed governance and safety controls alongside AI deployment was a factor in its investment.