Today’s asset managers, hedge funds, and fintech platforms know that speed and accuracy lie at the heart of success.
Businesses across industries are constantly competing to find an edge in efficiency and precision, but they often lack the infrastructure to get ahead. Although artificial intelligence continues to expand at breakneck speed, many firms fall behind because they don’t have the systems required to make intelligent decisions that are quick, reliable, and autonomous.
Self-taught engineer Daniel Kornum, better known as DK, first noticed this problem in his role as Citadel Securities’ EMEA chief operating officer, where he oversaw multi-asset operations and engineered new systems that transformed the way the company used AI.
DK’s innovative strategies helped build systems that turned fragmented market data into clean signals that could be analysed for optimal performance. He is the founder and CEO of NakedSignal, which is the infrastructure powering a new type of intelligence known as agentic AI that can access real-time data and make optimal decisions to help businesses succeed.
Today’s article is a deep dive into a career spent at the forefront of finance, data, and emerging infrastructure.
Daniel Kornum: A Systems Thinker in a World of Strategists
DK credits his success to his mother, a young, single mom who supported him every step of the way.
He taught himself to code while still in school, and went on to become #2 at the junior national chess championships and the #3 ranked StarCraft II player in the world, sharpening his intuition for feedback loops, incentives, and optimisation under pressure.
DK earned degrees in economics and mathematics from Cambridge University, and wrote his thesis on the valuation of U.S. tech startups and applying econometrics to real-world market efficiency questions. He also led a team to break two world records in rowing and was honored with the highest sports award at Cambridge for varsity skiing against Oxford.
After graduating, he began his professional career at McKinsey & Company in London, where he led and co-authored an analysis of global banking productivity titled Winning the European Productivity Race.
DK was then recruited by Citadel Securities, one of the largest and most successful hedge funds and market makers in the world. There, he earned public designation from the UK Financial Conduct Authority as both a material risk taker and person of significant control — titles typically reserved for executives at important institutions — and led the company’s Brexit transition as its Chief Operating Officer for its EMEA region. Following Brexit, he was named a board representative and executive and operating committee member for multiple Citadel entities.
During this time, DK had a revelation: in order for automation to work in the trading space and beyond, businesses need access to real-time data. However, because those systems didn’t yet exist outside of historically cutting-edge industries like high-frequency trading, he had to build them himself.
A New Challenge: How to Benchmark Fixed Income Execution
Fixed income markets are complex financial institutions that allow bonds to be traded by big corporations and investors who receive fixed interest payments in return. Mismanagement can lead to disaster for business portfolios.
At Citadel Securities, DK developed a benchmarking system that improved the company’s ability to evaluate the quality of its trading flows, and designed an infrastructure using Python that measured its success.
This system worked so seamlessly that it was adopted by the broader Citadel Securities team. Its innovative design was brand new, requiring complex engineering and a knowledge of economics that established DK as a valuable leader at one of the world’s largest and most successful financial institutions.
Game Theory, Data Markets, and the Logic of Agents: An Evolution of Intellect and Design
Agents, whether human or artificial, need the right data inputs to function at speed and scale.
‘As the rest of the world starts to truly adopt automation through agentic AI, they will also need access to this real-time data,’ DK explains. ‘However, these data streams don’t exist. We’re building them.’
But how do you build systems that support intelligent agents operating in the real world?
In pursuit of an answer, DK founded NakedSignal to address a core limitation in AI deployment. While models have evolved rapidly, their environments have not, with most AI systems still operating on stale, poorly structured data that leaves them blind to real-world change.
In finance, this costs millions. In sectors like insurance, logistics, and credit, it creates systemic risk.
DK saw this first-hand, so he built infrastructure to quantify execution quality in opaque bond flows, turning unstructured data into actionable signals. That experience revealed a broader truth: intelligence isn’t just about decision-making, it’s about observability.
As an example, one of NakedSignal’s first test users was a major consumer insurance provider that regularly acquires consumer data (which is part of the over $300 billion global big data market) to identify upselling, cross-selling, and user acquisition opportunities. The problem was that most of this data was already three months old, leaving agents making sales calls to someone who purchased coverage on their new home months prior. While companies are paying billions of dollars for this kind of outdated information, NakedSignal promises to be substantially more valuable by providing real-time data streams instead.
Daniel Kornum: Innovator, Engineer, and AI Systems Architect
DK is focused on building systems that are better, more efficient, and more profitable for companies across multiple sectors like finance, insurance, real estate, and payments.
He recently co-authored a book that is set to be released in October 2025 by the publisher Hans Reitzels Forlag, an imprint of Gyldendal, Denmark’s largest and oldest publisher, often seen as the national equivalent of Harvard University Press or Penguin. This book will reflect on the systems and infrastructures that DK has designed to help insurance, real estate, and credit companies succeed with real-time data and agentic AI.
Daniel Kornum’s unparalleled expertise and knowledge lays out a foundation for businesses to build systems that are strategic and applicable across a wide range of industries. With a valuable combination of hands-on experience in some of the world’s most successful companies and an innovative vision for financial success using agentic AI, DK has redefined what AI can do now and in the future.
