Kalshi’s institutional pitch to Wall Street centres on one argument: prediction markets offer a more direct hedge than anything traditional derivatives desks currently provide. Andy Ross, the platform’s head of institutional, has been making that case to banks, asset managers, and hedge funds since Markets Media reported his hire in March of this year.
The pitch has two tracks. The first is trading: using Kalshi’s customisable contracts to take on risks that conventional hedges address only indirectly. The second, more immediate in practice, is data. With millions of users pricing outcomes across a wide range of topics, Kalshi’s order flow generates crowdsourced intelligence that institutional investors can consume without placing a single trade.
Ross cited an internal analysis showing that some of Kalshi’s markets were right 93% of the time a week out from an event. That accuracy claim is his door-opener with sceptical counterparts. ‘I can’t tell you the number of conversations that I’ve had, which is, “Give me the data. Great, right, wow, that’s amazing. Explain how I can trade now tomorrow please,”‘ he said.
The Kalshi Institutional Pitch: Hedging Over Gambling
Ross brings heavyweight derivatives credentials to the role. He spent 16 years at Morgan Stanley, where he became European Head of OTC clearing, before leading LSEG’s CurveGlobal unit as chief executive, a joint interest rate derivatives venture with seven major dealer banks and the Chicago Board Options Exchange. He subsequently served as Financial Markets UK Head and Global Head Prime Brokerage at Standard Chartered Bank before joining Kalshi. He is based in London.
That background shapes how he frames the product. The Kalshi institutional pitch is not about sports wagers, even though sports contracts remain the platform’s largest revenue driver. It is about giving corporations and asset managers a contract that maps precisely onto the risk they are carrying, rather than asking them to build an imperfect proxy from rate futures or options.
Liquidity remains the central operational challenge. Kalshi does not take the other side of any trade, so it must find both a buyer and a seller for every outcome. For larger, more customised trades that process is still partly manual. Ross described personally calling a market maker to help a hedge fund establish a position on US CPI. He frames this as a transitional phase while the exchange builds out the infrastructure, and says the metric he watches most closely is whether banks begin trading on the platform themselves. ‘They’re doing it because their clients want to. There’s palpable demand around that. That’s the thing that I think is the key sort of trigger point that I’m looking at,’ he said.
On the question of market abuse, Ross is direct. Traders on Kalshi must complete full anti-money laundering and know-your-customer checks; US traders must supply a social security number; and the platform can generate alerts when users trade contracts related to their own employment, according to Markets Media. ‘If you want to try and do some market manipulation, insider trading on Kalshi, we will find you. We know where you are, and you’ll go to jail,’ Ross said.
Regulatory Headwinds Cloud the Opportunity
Kalshi operates as a Designated Contract Market under the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), a status the regulator granted in November 2020. On 17 January 2025, the CFTC further modified Kalshi’s designation to permit intermediated futures trading, according to the CFTC’s designated contract markets registry.
That regulatory progress has not gone uncontested. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange filed suit in the US District Court for the District of Columbia against the CFTC, arguing the regulator wrongfully allowed Kalshi to list perpetual futures contracts through an expedited review and that those contracts received different regulation and more favourable tax treatment than CME-listed products, Courthouse News reported.
A broader regulatory framework is also unresolved. A CFTC proposal to govern prediction markets including Kalshi and Polymarket was under White House Office of Management and Budget review as of late May 2026, with CFTC Chairman Michael Selig having indicated in January that the agency intended to write new rules and drop a prior proposal that would have banned trades on sports and politics, according to CNBC.
Meanwhile, Kalshi’s relationship with US state regulators has produced friction. On 12 July 2026, the platform filed an emergency rule with the CFTC seeking to force-liquidate positions of identified Michigan-based users, amid a $120,000-per-day penalty exposure and a court mandate to cancel executed trades. The CFTC stayed the emergency rule two days later and directed Kalshi to honour open trades involving Michigan residents, the Government Enforcement Report noted, describing it as an unprecedented exercise of federal authority.
Ross acknowledged that even natural institutional allies, such as professional sports team owners, bring complicated incentives. ‘Neither do you want to be able to say, right, I’m going to put a hedge on that I’m going to get relegated, and then you sell all your players, right? That’s the concern,’ he said. For the Kalshi institutional pitch to fully land on Wall Street, the liquidity build-out and the outcome of the CFTC rulemaking will matter far more than any single sales call.