Opetek Launches ARIUS, An AI Reasoning Platform For Institutional Trading Desks - Tier 1 Bank Pilots ARIUS Across Live FX Options Workflows In New York, London And Singapore

Opetek today announced the launch of ARIUS, its proprietary quantitative reasoning platform for institutional capital markets. Designed for front-office trading desks, ARIUS reasons through complex market problems at speed, producing explainable, auditable and reproducible outputs that support faster, better-informed decisions.

ARIUS is currently being piloted by traders and quants at a Tier 1 global investment bank across live FX options workflows in New York, London and Singapore. Teams are using ARIUS to analyse complex market questions, test scenarios and support live trading decisions. Opetek is also preparing a further deployment with another Tier 1 institution.

Trading desks are under pressure to make faster, better-informed decisions, but decision-making remains constrained by four sources of friction. Fragmented workflows across market data, analytics, risk, research and communications systems reduce context. Vast quantities of market data create cognitive overload beyond what individuals can process. Bespoke analysis and manual coding delay insight generation. Finally, undocumented assumptions make decisions difficult to inspect, reproduce and monitor.

ARIUS is designed to reduce these sources of decision friction. It reasons across market data, pricing models, analytics and news, connecting information that would otherwise sit across disconnected systems. Through a natural-language interface, traders and quants can generate bespoke analysis and code at speed, reducing the time spent gathering inputs, preparing data and building one-off analysis.

Users can inspect the calculations, assumptions, methodologies, code and market data inputs behind its output, creating a reviewable reasoning trail that can be challenged by traders and quants to support institutional governance requirements, while keeping the reasoning under human control.

The platform is delivered as a standalone application that sits above institutions’ existing data, analytics and model layers. This allows firms to introduce advanced reasoning capabilities without replacing their existing trading infrastructure. ARIUS currently integrates with Refinitiv/LSEG market data and Opetek’s proprietary pricing and analytics.

FX options is the first asset-class application of Opetek’s proprietary capital-markets reasoning engine. The company plans to extend the same underlying architecture to other asset classes such as equities, fixed income, commodities, credit and digital assets.

Opetek was founded by Varqa Abyaneh, previously Chief Product Officer at Quantile, which was acquired by LSEG. His career has included senior roles in derivatives trading, quantitative analysis and product development at investment banks including HSBC. He is joined by Philip Beadling, CTO and former Chief Architect at Quantile, and Henry Ip, Machine Learning Lead.

Varqa Abyaneh, Founder and CEO of Opetek, commented:

“One of the most fundamental challenges in financial markets is deciding what to trade. Reaching that decision requires quantitative analysis and qualitative judgement across market data, pricing models, analytics and news, often under severe time pressure. Because these are high-value decisions, speed alone is not enough. Trading desks need reasoning that is explainable, auditable, and reproducible.” 

“We built ARIUS around that complexity. ARIUS helps trading desks reason better and decide faster, while keeping the reasoning visible and under human control.”