"Be Afraid Every Day": 30 Years of Disruption in Capital Markets (Ashok Mittal)

// TRANSMISSION

In this episode, I'm joined by Ashok Mittal, founder and CEO of FinTech Global Center — a company he's been building for 30 years across consulting, trading-system development, and now product.

Ashok walks us through his arc from studying AI in 1986 to co-founding an inter-dealer broker that survived 9/11, to running his own brokerage across New York, London, Singapore, and Japan, to today's flagship product, FGCTMS — a fixed-income trading and trade management system going head-to-head with Bloomberg TOMS in a niche Bloomberg hasn't prioritized.

Trillions of dollars have flowed through the systems his team has built. We dig into why the post-COVID interest-rate shift (baby boomers moving from 4% mixed-return portfolios to 4-6% fixed income) has fundamentally reshaped the market and why the trading tools haven't kept up with the velocity, the bid-offer compression, and stricter regulators.

Ashok is refreshingly direct about AI: it's generating 10x to 30x efficiencies, it's thinning every software and domain-expertise moat, and the real question isn't growth — it's existential. We talk through being the first company to build a trading system in the cloud (2014), his global R&D model out of India delivering "faster, better, and cheaper" at once, and why his parting advice to every founder and professional is to "be afraid every day."

🔗 Guest & Resources

Connect with Ashok Mittal:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ahmittal/

FinTech Global Center:

https://fintechglobal.center/

Jonathan W. Buckley: https:www.jonathanwbuckley.com

The Artesian Network: https://www.artesiannetwork.com

🔑 Keywords

fintech global center, Ashok Mittal, fixed income trading, trade management system, Bloomberg toms, capital markets, institutional trading, inter-dealer broker, wall street, cloud trading, ai in finance, agentic ai, jamie dimon, bid offer compression, regulation, software disruption, 10x efficiency, global r&d india, faster better cheaper, entrepreneurship, moat erosion, llm impact, trading infrastructure