Capitolis names Bank of America veteran as CTO to drive AI push

Capitolis, the New York-based fintech that helps global banks optimise balance-sheet capital, has appointed Murugan Manickam as Chief Technology Officer. Manickam arrives from Bank of America, where he spent 17 years as Managing Director and Global Head of FICC Macro Trade Management and Emerging Markets Technology. He reports to President Okan Pekin and takes responsibility for Capitolis' global engineering organisation, its data infrastructure, and its AI strategy.

The appointment is a clear signal that Capitolis intends to push deeper into AI-driven automation at the post-trade layer of capital markets. Manickam's specific background in fixed income, currencies, and commodities (FICC), regulatory technology, and distributed ledger technology (DLT) adoption maps directly onto the infrastructure challenges Capitolis was built to solve: unlocking trapped capital on the balance sheets of Tier 1 banks by netting, novating, and compressing their bilateral derivatives portfolios.

From transformation to productisation

At Bank of America, Manickam led large-scale infrastructure modernisation programmes spanning FX, credit, rates, and emerging markets, consolidating legacy platforms and advancing DLT adoption alongside AI-driven automation. Earlier roles at Merrill Lynch and General Reinsurance add depth across both the sell side and institutional risk management. That breadth matters for Capitolis, whose client network spans global and regional banks simultaneously. The company has framed his mandate explicitly in terms of both platform innovation and client value delivery, suggesting the near-term priority is translating existing engineering capability into more differentiated product.

Capitolis is backed by a roster of top-tier venture investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Index Ventures, and Spark Capital, alongside strategic stakes from Barclays, BNP Paribas, Citi, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Standard Chartered, State Street, and UBS. That dual structure, VC capital plus bank shareholders, gives the company unusual leverage when selling into the very institutions that own equity in it. The company says it has recorded record business results heading into Q4 2026, though no specific revenue or volume figures were disclosed.

The wider convergence read

The CTO appointment sits within a broader pattern that Disrupts readers will recognise: post-trade infrastructure is quietly becoming one of the most consequential battlegrounds in applied AI. As generative and agentic AI capabilities mature, the competitive advantage in capital markets is shifting from raw trading speed to the intelligence layer governing capital allocation, regulatory reporting, and balance-sheet compression. Firms that can automate FICC post-trade workflows at scale stand to unlock meaningful operational cost reduction for their bank clients, at a moment when those banks are themselves under pressure to demonstrate capital efficiency to regulators on both sides of the Atlantic.

For cross-sector investors, the signal is this: the next wave of fintech infrastructure spend is not in retail payments or consumer lending. It is in the institutional plumbing that governs how trillions of dollars of derivatives exposure are managed daily. Sovereign wealth funds and long-duration institutional investors with exposure to global bank equities should watch whether platforms like Capitolis are able to convert AI-driven post-trade optimisation into measurable return-on-equity improvements for their bank shareholders. If they can, the capital currently circling AI infrastructure broadly may find a more concentrated home in this segment.

Amos Arev, who led engineering at Capitolis for the past seven years and built the platform's core technology organisation, will remain with the company in his role as Head of Engineering and General Manager for Israel, providing continuity through the leadership transition.