Roman Ginis is the CEO of Imperative Execution.

How will the new year be known?

It will be “The Year of Artificial Intelligence in Trading.” Both brokers and investors are doing some very innovative work to incorporate AI into the investment process, and we think there is a significant opportunity for exchanges and alternative trading systems, such as our recently launched IntelligentCross ATS, to bring real innovation in this regard as well.

What changes do you expect to see regarding equity trading in 2019?

We believe there will be increased investments in AI and machine learning. As we have seen so far with our platform, AI can be used to help brokers in their efforts to minimize their clients’ biggest challenge when it comes to trading, the cost market impact. With AI’s vast applications, there is no doubt it will become even more pervasive and potentially solve even more market issues.

Are there any market structure changes that should take place in 2019?

We believe that the efforts by trading venues to minimize market impact leave quite a bit to be desired. Institutional investors suffer the most from market response, specifically price dislocation coming from market overreaction to trades. Although some of the big buy-side only block trading pools have helped, it’s challenging to find two natural investors on the opposite side of the same trade at the same time. As a result, both the buy – and sell sides have made tremendous advancements to remedy this problem when interacting with the overall market, and we think that “smart venues” like ours can be a very powerful augment. In our view, there is still much room for continued innovation in minimizing this impact.

Do you expect investments in fintech to rise, fall, or remain level in the coming year?

Technologies like AI, machine learning, and cloud computing have been continuously improving and increasingly being integrated into all industries. In many cases, they are making possible innovative solutions that were literally not possible only a few years ago. However, there are still many significant players in the financial industry who have yet to incorporate these technologies into their business and workflows fully. As more and more of these innovations come to market and are incorporated by the largest investors and their brokers, we see investment capital flowing commensurately.