“Our relationship with GCP has been long-standing, marked by collaboration and innovation,” Guy Melamed, Exberry CEO, tells TradingTech Insight. “Joining the Google Cloud Marketplace takes this collaboration to a new level. For smaller exchanges or venues, the marketplace offers a streamlined way to select vendors and suppliers, knowing that all offerings meet GCP’s high standards. Not only does the Marketplace provide us with increased visibility, making it easier for potential clients to find us, but the ongoing collaboration between the GCP team and the Exberry team allows us to think together about future prospects, opening up many new opportunities.”

This latest move builds on Exberry’s successful track record, with numerous clients already benefiting from the company’s cloud-agnostic exchange infrastructure. Exberry’s advanced technology is designed to enable customers to develop future market and exchange solutions, benefiting from features such as adaptability, modern architecture, Software as a Service (SaaS), scalability, and rapid deployment.

“When we started the company, our goal was to be cloud-agnostic,” says Melamed. “Whether you want to deploy on AWS, GCP, or Azure, as an independent vendor, we believe in giving you the choice, so we’re committed to supporting all major cloud providers. And our architecture allows for deployment on-premises as well, which is crucial for markets that prefer colo or on-prem setups.”

Exberry’s integration with GCP not only provides a seamless technological transition to the cloud for existing markets but also supports the establishment of new markets with minimal time and resource investment.

“Our continuous advancement ensures we’re always at the forefront, ready for any changes,” says Melamed. “Additionally, we play a role in the ecosystem that requires being risk-averse while still advancing technology. We collaborate with cloud providers to enhance our technology, latency, integrability, and our operational model, enabling us to deploy systems in days or weeks, which is unprecedented in our industry. Another step for Exberry in supporting the transition we see in the capital markets and making exchanges future-ready.”

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The launch of EWIN represents a significant technological advancement for the exchange group. Developed in collaboration with McKay Brothers, the independent microwave network provider, and leveraging the faster transmission speeds of microwave technology, EWIN offers a direct and highly efficient communication pathway, reducing the time required to send orders from London Equinix LD4 to Euronext’s Optiq matching engine in Bergamo IT3 to under four milliseconds, around half the latency of existing fibre links. EWIN is also designed to ensure seamless and efficient order handling, offering 100% resilience, thanks to its full fibre back-up.

Major financial firms Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have already adopted the new technology.

“After establishing our new IT3 data centre in Bergamo, near Milan, we realised from a few large tier-one brokers that they were interested in exploring the performance benefits of microwave technologies,” explains Nicolas Rivard, Global Head of Cash Equity and Data Services at Euronext, in conversation with TradingTech Insight. “Although microwave networks have been around for some time and are relatively established for certain participants, it is a costly and complex technology with a high barrier to entry. Typically, you cannot buy a small amount of bandwidth, which makes the solution expensive. Additionally, there is a technical aspect because you need to develop IT capabilities to route your orders through the microwave. By default, if you buy bandwidth from a microwave provider, it’s not plug-and-play; you need to develop your protocol into the technology.”

Euronext has worked closely with McKay Brothers to address these challenges, says Rivard. “To lower the barrier to entry in terms of cost, we have purchased a bulk of bandwidth and are offering it to clients in slices, starting from 1 Mbps upwards. This means that clients can try it for six months at 1 Mbps for example, and then scale up as needed, rather than committing to a costly solution from the outset. And to address the technical complexities, the solution we’ve developed together with McKay Brothers allows clients to use the microwave link as if it were any other standard connectivity, making it very plug-and-play.”

The microwave route, provided by McKay Brothers, has been operational for two years, since Euronext went live on IT3 in Bergamo in June 2022. But this is the first time McKay’s technology has been used to underpin an exchange’s own solution.

“The development and design of this service has been quite new compared to our usual offerings,” says Stéphane Tyc, Co-Founder of McKay Brothers. “Typically, when a client purchases microwave bandwidth, they need to undertake significant internal development to integrate with the network. However, Euronext’s end clients don’t need to perform any additional integration work; they simply need to set up logical access to Euronext’s matching engine, a process they are already familiar with. And then they can benefit from a fast network that competes with the microwave products used by market makers. The important thing here is that firms who want to use this link can now just go direct to the exchange to access it, without having to put in place dedicated technology.”

Given that microwave networks are susceptible to weather and other atmospheric conditions, how does Euronext ensure resiliency? “We have two routes, one microwave and one fibre, and they work seamlessly together,” says Rivard. “We have ensured, with McKay and our internal IT team, that every order gets sent twice, once via microwave and once via fibre. The first order that reaches the IT3 datacentre is processed, and the other is blocked by the system. This guarantees 100% redundancy, increasing the overall availability of the service.”

The link is now operational, with Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs having gone live on day one, 10th July. “The technology has delivered on its promise so far, with latency below four milliseconds and very stable performance,” says Rivard. “Clients are currently only sending specific order types via EWIN to improve certain latency sensitive execution strategies, such as IOC (immediate or cancel) and other aggressive orders. The number of packets going through the microwave is what we expected. And of course, this is just the beginning.”

Both Euronext and McKay Brothers talk of this new service as a way of further democratising the market, bridging the gap between prop trading firms/market makers and banks/brokers. So will it be rolled out to other European centres?

“First, we need to make sure it works from London, to prove that it has an impact and is beneficial for our clients. That will take a few months to confirm,” says Rivard. “But we already have clients interested in having the same service from other locations and asset classes in Europe.”

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Options Technology supports trading at numerous venues worldwide with its managed infrastructure and connectivity services, along with private financial cloud services that combine hosting with direct market access, total cost of ownership reduction, and top-tier resiliency and security.

“One of the aims with this collaboration is to enable customers to utilise the Options Atlas feed more efficiently, says Grethe Brown, CEO of DiffusionData, in conversation with TradingTech Insight. “Our approach allows us to handle data transformation and distribution, significantly reducing egress costs by delivering only the specific data the trader needs. Unlike the standard practice of sending all data, we provide a sophisticated distribution that transmits only the delta—the difference between successive data points—resulting in greater efficiency and cost savings. Also, from a DiffusionData perspective, our team will benefit from collaborating with a larger entity like Options. This partnership will enhance our capabilities, providing a more comprehensive solution with Options’ consolidated data service than we currently offer.”

The Diffusion framework offers control over end-to-end data flow, creation of personalised data streams, and efficient data delivery through patented bandwidth optimisation, which will enable clients to fully leverage Options’ consolidated data service.

“There are numerous applications for personalised data streams. For instance, in FX liquidity provision, a bank might quote different FX rates to different tiers of customers,” says Brown. “Additionally, they may choose to apply a delay to some of their data, allowing them to charge lower fees to customers who receive the data with a 15-minute delay.”

Danny Moore, President and CEO of Options, commented: “Our partnership with DiffusionData represents a significant advancement in our ability to deliver robust and scalable data solutions to our clients. By integrating Diffusion’s cutting-edge data streaming technology with our consolidated data service, we are not only enhancing data delivery but also empowering our clients to gain real-time insights and make informed decisions faster and more efficiently. This collaboration underscores our commitment to providing innovative and reliable infrastructure that meets the evolving needs of the capital markets.”

Grethe Brown, CEO of DiffusionData, commented on the partnership: “By integrating our Diffusion framework with Options’ consolidated data service, we are providing clients with a powerful solution that combines real-time data streaming with unparalleled control and efficiency. This collaboration will enable users to harness the full potential of their data, delivering seamless and personalised data streams that drive better decision-making and operational performance. Together, we are setting a new standard for data delivery in the financial services industry.”

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For FINBOURNE clients, the integration with Taskize aims to reduce resolution times, lower human error, and boost operational efficiency and staff capacity. Additionally, Taskize’s detailed management reporting promises better decision-making and operational resource allocation.

We’ve known about Taskize for a while and have had an integration with them for several years,” says Gus Sekhon, Head of Product, FINBOURNE Technology. “However, this enhancement goes much deeper, providing an automated intercompany exception management service that is ready to go. The interesting part is how it works: FINBOURNE’s own workflow invokes a Taskize Bubble (the Taskize term for a protected intercompany workflow) which connects and coordinates across the client’s counterparties through that Bubble, notifying changes back to FINBOURNE. This creates a seamless intercompany break resolution service that can be invoked during any client process, allowing breaks to be worked through and resolved efficiently.”

Building on the initial integration of Taskize into FINBOURNE’s LUSID platform in 2021, the expanded partnership further strengthens the external exception management and query resolution capabilities for the company’s front-to-back investment technology users. The new integration enables FINBOURNE clients to better manage the exceptions that often disrupt the IBOR and ABOR calculation process. By utilising Taskize workflow solutions for exception resolution, users can now dynamically prioritise and resolve complex IBOR and ABOR post-trade exceptions, which helps overcome the challenges posed by shorter settlement times in the new T+1 settlement environment, says Sekhon.

“From the perspective of IBOR & ABOR, the fundamental point for an efficient operations workflow is ensuring the data is as clean as possible from the start,” he says. “This means time can be spent on product research or performance analysis rather than wasting the majority on data cleansing, as some companies do. Coordinating across counterparties and pushing results back through the workflow eliminates the need to access multiple systems, hunt for the right contact, monitor progress, and check on task completion. This coordination in one place represents a significant efficiency gain for our clients in this cleansing process.”

The functionality is part of FINBOURNE’s Horizon programme, allowing clients to seamlessly access, integrate, and connect with various external technology and data sources within the LUSID platform.

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“What continues to amaze me in this industry is that firms compete heavily to hire quantitative talent, only to have them spend 80% of their time cleaning unsuitable data. This has to change,” states Paul Humphrey, CEO of BMLL, in conversation with TradingTech Insight. “Considering the expense and investment in this talent, we should be drawing the very best from them. It’s like commissioning a painting from an artist and then asking them to redecorate the studio first; it just doesn’t make sense. There’s a lot of useless data occupying financial services firms. Instead of using a kdb+ estate to store raw data and having engineers try to make something of it, we can now provide best-in-class historical data in a format that suits the engine our customers are working on, so they can perform all the analysis they want right out of the gate.”

BMLL’s datasets capture full order book data across more than 100 trading venues, providing consistent granularity at Levels 3, 2, and 1. This data is utilised by banks, brokers, asset managers, hedge funds, global exchange groups, and academic institutions to gain insights into market behaviour.

INQDATA, a cloud-based data solutions provider, simplifies the ingestion, processing, storage, and management of analytic-ready market data. Its high-performance environment, powered by KX’s kdb+ high-performance time-series database, query language and analytics engine used extensively in financial markets, ensures rapid access to cleansed, real-time, and historical datasets.

The collaboration between BMLL and INQDATA enables data scientists and application developers to efficiently access and explore granular historical market data and analytics derived from Level 3 data. By ingesting BMLL data directly into their existing kdb+ estate, the integration allows users to better leverage their kdb+ environment to enhance their trading strategies, test new markets quickly, understand execution costs, and improve the development of quantitative models.

“For years, many in the marketplace have relied on a kdb+ estate to manage their real-time data and provide market analytics. kdb+ has been a popular installation due to its excellent handling of real-time data,” says Humphrey. “However, it’s not the best for just storing historical data. INQDATA addresses this by converting our data into a format that integrates seamlessly with kdb+ estates, allowing users to utilise the data immediately. And that aligns with our commitment to making our data available in the format clients prefer, a principle that also led to our recently announced partnership with Snowflake.”

The integration aims to democratise access to data and analytics, allowing market participants to utilise BMLL’s API library and quantitative analysis tools within their environment. By reducing the burden of data engineering and infrastructure, users can focus on conducting comprehensive analyses to improve trading outcomes.

“Strategy testing and optimisation are clear use cases,” says Humphrey. “Backtesting strategies to explore various what-if scenarios can be done easily and quickly within an existing kdb+ environment, essentially transforming historical data into pre-trade data to guide your algorithms.”

By combining BMLL’s data curation and analytics with INQDATA’s data management capabilities, the partnership offers market participants reliable historical market data without the need for extensive reformatting. The scalable cloud architecture provided by both companies supports large-scale quantitative and market microstructure analyses.

“Customers come to us for the uniqueness and the heavy lifting we’ve done on our content. It’s crucial for us to remain agnostic regarding how clients want their data. This approach is yet another delivery mechanism, providing data to clients in the format they prefer.”

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The basket of new offerings brings together Informatica’s range of AI-powered Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) capabilities within Databricks’ Data Intelligence Platform, the California-based enterprise cloud data management provider said.

Topping the list is Informatica’s GenAI solution blueprint for Databricks’ DBRX large language model (LLM), which permits the construction of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)-based GenAI applications.

Informatica said users of the blueprint would benefit from its incorporation of the low-code/no-code IDMC interface and Databricks Vector Database, allowing access to trusted and actionable data insights at scale. The blueprint provides for effective selection and application of enterprise data to ensure trusted responses from GenAI applications and enable their rapid scaling, Informatica said.

The company also announced a native SQL ELT for Databricks’ SQL data warehouse, enabling scalable data transformations and integrations. Customers of Databricks Partner Connect will also have access to Informatica’s Cloud Data Integration-free Service (CDI-Free), providing ELT processing of as many as 20 million rows of data or 10 ELT compute hours per month at no extra cost. The fourth announcement was for full IDMC support for governance processes through Databricks’ Unity Catalog.

Databricks senior vice president Adam Conway said the extended partnership with Informatica would be crucial to the successful implementation of clients’ AI ambitions.

“In the era of GenAI, access to trusted, high-quality data is becoming more essential than ever, especially for RAG implementations,” Conway said. ****“The addition of Informatica’s low-code/no-code CDI-free solution to Databricks Partner Connect, plus the integration of IDMC with Unity Catalog and new analytical data metadata exploration capabilities for RAG-based GenAI, accelerates access to high-quality data for customers building AI solutions and applications on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform.”

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The awards were presented during a celebratory drinks reception after the close of A-Team Group’s TradingTech Briefing in New York City on 6 June 2024.

This year’s awards included more than 40 categories ranging from Best Matching Engine for Cryptocurrency Trading Venues to Best High Performance Network Services, Best Equities Trading Solution, Best Machine-Readable News Supplier, Best AI Solution for Trading, Best Trade Reporting Solution, Best Overall Market Data Provider, Best Specialist Market Data Consultancy and more.

An editor’s recognition award for USA Trading Technology Industry Professional of the Year was presented to Steve Schiff, Vice President, Index Technology at Nasdaq.

Andrew Delaney, President and Chief Content Officer at A-Team Group, said: “Congratulations to the award winners and thank you to all the vendors that entered A-Team Group’s TradingTech Insight Awards USA 2024, to our TradingTech Insight community that voted for its preferred solutions, and to our independent, expert advisory board that worked in collaboration with our editorial team to select this year’s winners.”

A complete list of winners and their solutions can be found in the TradingTech Insight Awards – USA 2024 report.

You can find out more about A-Team Group awards, which also cover RegTech, Data Management and ESG here.

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The newly launched OPaaS – already in use at a number of major financial institutions worldwide – will be offered as a fully hosted solution, available both on-premise and in the cloud. The joint solution is aimed at firms who wish to benefit from CJC’s extensive experience in monitoring and critical infrastructure support, and from BCC Group’s consolidated, vendor-neutral market data distribution capabilities.

CJC has developed a real-time monitoring and observability stack and will provide support through its 24×7 service centres located in Singapore, Hong Kong, London, and New York. CJC is also ISO 27001 certified and DORA compliant, ensuring robust security and regulatory compliance.

Mauricio González Evans, BCC Group’s CEO, commented: “As a global operating company, CJC will support BCC Group worldwide in the implementation and operation of the ONE Platform, Calcnode and other complementary products. CJC will also support us in the implementation of ONE Platform projects, including the migration of legacy applications to the modern and neutral ONE API.”

The ONE Platform from BCC Group offers a comprehensive suite of features, including feed handlers, last value cache, publishing, subscribing, authentication, entitlement management, reporting, scalable fan-out, and a graphical interface. The ONE API supports all types of data sets, from real-time streaming to historical data.

Paul Gow, CJC’s Founder and CEO, commented: “In our 25th year it’s great to be working with Mauricio and the team at BCC Group who have been pioneers in getting market data to the cloud with the powerful ONE Platform. This combination of vendor-neutral software and support providers puts end-users firmly in control of their data roadmap.”

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This year’s platinum award winner is Regnology for its Most Innovative Regulatory Reporting Solution. Gold award winners include Interop.io, Quod Financial, S&P Global Market Intelligence, and SmartStream Technologies, with plenty more entrants picking up silver awards.

The Innovation Awards 2024 included over 40 categories across A-Team Group’s Data Management Insight, TradingTech Insight, RegTech Insight and ESG Insight news channels. They ranged from Most Innovative Smart Trader Desktops and Workflows to Most Innovative Data Standards Initiative, Most Innovative ESG Data Solution, Most Innovative AI in Regulatory Compliance Initiative, Most Innovative Data-Driven Transformation Project, Most Innovative Financial Technology Executive, Most Innovative Professional Development Initiative, and more.

A complete list of winners and their solutions can be found in the Innovation Awards 2024 report.

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The integration will significantly reduce the time required for asset managers and hedge funds to move from strategy research to execution, enabling faster back-testing of trading strategies and a swifter transition to production. The announcement of the partnership follows the successful completion of data symbology mapping between QuantHouse’s real-time and BMLL’s historical data sets, ensuring a unified data format across all trading venues and asset classes.

“The nirvana for many trading firms is to have a quality real time feed mapped to a detailed historical feed, which has got all the fields in it that they might need, with no gaps, spikes or flaws,” says Paul Humphrey, BMLL’s CEO, in conversation with TradingTech Insight. “We’re very proud that QuantHouse, who has a superb real time business, has selected BMLL as its historical data partner, mapping its real time feed to our best-in-class historical feed. This will save trading firms a massive headache because it’s a heavy lift. So it is a real benefit for firms to be able to take that data, harmonised, in one format, across all venues.”

The harmonisation of the two data sets allows for more detailed liquidity mapping and improved trading performance analysis, and addresses the increasing market demand for high-quality, easily accessible historical data.

“It’s not on us to map ourselves to multiple real-time feeds,” says Humphrey. “We know our place in the market, we’re the base layer. Having leading real-time data providers like QuantHouse mapping to our symbology tells an enormous story about the quality of our product, which is now beyond debate.”

BMLL’s collaboration with QuantHouse follows other recently announced partnerships, including with Snowflake, who made a strategic investment in the company in September last year.

“We’ve significantly expanded our coverage, which was what we said we would do following our Series B investment round,” says Humphreys. “It wouldn’t matter how good our quality was if we only covered Europe and North America, that’s not enough. So we invested to expand our coverage, and we’re really proud that our game plan has come together nicely.”

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