Welcome to the latest edition of At the Forefront: Fintech Conversations!
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In this episode, Forefront Head of Content Sam Belden is joined by Jeff Bell, Co-Founder of Eventus, which provides at-scale trade surveillance software across all lines of defense through its Validus platform. Jeff traces Eventus’ practitioner-led roots back to his own years on the sell side, where seeing trade surveillance rules implemented and enforced firsthand shaped a founding philosophy built around speaking clients’ language and understanding not just the letter of a regulation, but its underlying intent.
That practitioner mindset shows up most clearly in how Eventus has architected its platform to keep pace with a capital markets landscape that keeps changing shape. Jeff explains that early, seemingly minor engineering decisions, like building in support for 24/7 operation, negative prices and fractional shares, ended up positioning Eventus to move quickly into digital assets and, more recently, prediction markets, since the underlying data model of accounts, orders, quantities and prices carries across most asset classes. That same flexibility extends globally: rather than building region-specific solutions, Eventus leans on high-touch client engagement across the US, EMEA and APAC to stay ahead of diverging regulatory priorities as they emerge.
Jeff applies that same lens to some of the biggest trends reshaping market structure today. He’s a firm believer in expanding market access through round-the-clock and tokenized trading, arguing it corrects a structural disadvantage for retail investors who can’t trade during traditional market hours. He also makes the case that tokenized and traditional assets shouldn’t really be thought of as separate categories at all, since they’re just different wrappers around exposure to the same underlying instrument, a conviction that’s driven Eventus to build a platform clients can consolidate all their surveillance needs into as those walls between markets keep coming down.
Prediction markets get particular attention, with Jeff walking through how surveillance challenges shift as the universe of possible “insiders” narrows dramatically, from a public company’s employees down to, in a sports betting context, perhaps a pitcher and catcher, while the sheer number of tradable contracts explodes into the millions. The conversation closes on Eventus’ Frank AI tool, which lets compliance teams query their own surveillance data in natural language while producing deterministic, auditable results, with Jeff previewing a roadmap that includes self-service automation building and deeper MCP integrations, all while keeping client data from ever leaving the Validus platform.
For more conversations with fintech and capital markets leaders, explore the At the Forefront podcast archive or our YouTube channel.
To learn more about Eventus, visit eventus.com.
TLDR
4:00 – How Eventus’s flexible data model lets it expand into new asset classes without rearchitecting
9:00 – Extended-hours trading, tokenization, and the case for expanding market access
17:30 – What makes surveillance in prediction markets different, from insider risk to contract volume
24:00 – Frank AI: how clients are using it today and what’s next on the roadmap