Liquidnet EMEA business development head departs for AI fintech Imandra

Appointment follows that of former chief operating officer at Goldman Sachs’ Sigma X MTF who joined Imandra in May.

Liquidnet’s former head of business development for EMEA has left the firm to join artificial intelligence (AI) fintech Imandra in a similar role, The TRADE can reveal.

Dan Squires has been appointed as a vice president of sales at Imandra after spending the last five years with Liquidnet, now part of interdealer broker TP ICAP.

Previously in his career, he served as a managing director and head of hedge fund coverage at Citigroup and held roles at Bank of America Merill Lynch and quantitative hedge fund, GSA Capital.

Private equity backed start-up Imandra claims to shed more light on the effectiveness of firms’ algorithms and systems by testing them using machine learning and artificial intelligence.

“Imandra systematically interrogates algorithms, bringing more transparency to how they work,” Squires told The TRADE.

Goldman Sachs has been a client of the firm for the last five years and an undisclosed US based equities and listed derivatives alternative trading system is also set to join the fintech’s client roster in the coming months.

Squires said Imandra’s offering could be used to create more transparency around venues’ operating systems, identifying causes of market outages and subsequently avoiding them in future.

The fintech also plans to work with exchanges to use machine learning to generate new actionable alternative data sets that can be purchased by trading firms to enhance execution.

“With plans for a consolidated tape underway, the technology can be used to bring new products to market and offer new revenue streams for venues,” he said.

Squires’ appointment at Imandra follows that of Paul Brennan, former chief operating officer of Goldman Sachs’ MTF Sigma X, who joined the fintech in May after 15 years with the investment bank.

Regulators are likely to begin mandating a more robust testing environment for all manner of systems in the coming years. In light of this several initiatives have been launched including plans for agent-based testing environments for trading strategies and algorithms set out by the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) and the Dutch Authority for Financial Markets (AFM).

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