Bullish has signed a multi-year deal with Adaptive to replace its incumbent messaging vendor technology with Adaptive’s Aeron Premium, and to receive support and professional services.

Adaptive’s Aeron Premium is an enterprise-grade product which complements the Aeron open-source technology, providing additional software components for performance, security, and resilience.

As a cloud-native exchange built on Google Cloud’s scalable infrastructure, Bullish was able to source Adaptive’s Aeron Premium services directly through Google Cloud Marketplace. 

“As a cloud-native exchange, we believe that the future of finance is firmly rooted in the cloud. Bullish was already using Adaptive’s FIX engine and we also have strong ties with Google Cloud,” said Alan Fraser, head of platform infrastructure at Bullish.

“[…] Leveraging Adaptive’s support services provided us with invaluable expertise and assurance, significantly mitigating the risk associated with upgrading to a more scalable architecture.” 

According to a recent AWS whitepaper from January, key advantages of moving financial market infrastructure to the cloud include lower barriers to launching new markets globally, thanks to increased standardisation and harmonisation. Other benefits include the ability to operate 24/7, access to cutting-edge technology, cost savings, and improved operational efficiency.

Despite these benefits, legacy systems were built in a different time, and operations are steeped in historical processes and data. This therefore requires large amounts of investment and attention to allow market players to execute their goals. 

Read more: As cloud adoption across the market continues to rise, is the shift of liquidity itself next to follow?

Since implementing Aeron Premium, the Bullish exchange has achieved a number of business benefits including improved throughput and capacity, high availability of Bullish’s 24/7 exchange operations, and added security.

“Aeron technology is specifically designed to handle very large data volumes with minimal latency, ensuring 24/7 high availability, not only in traditional on-premises environments but more importantly on the public cloud, providing a robust backbone for Bullish’s 24/7 trading operations,” said Matt Barrett, chief executive and co-founder of Adaptive.

In the future, Bullish aims to utilise further Aeron Premium components for clustering and resilience to create a more flexible and maintainable infrastructure, enabling the exchange to perform hot upgrades in a 24/7 market, significantly reducing maintenance challenges. 

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Ed Wicks, global head of trading, Legal & General Investment Management

Mike Carrodus, CEO, Substantive Research: In 2023, tipping points will be hit across investment research and data. The recently announced Bernstein/SG deal indicates the direction of travel in research, where even premium research products and services become part of wider platforms with multiple revenue streams. Mifid II arguably removed a great deal of “nice to have” research from the market, but the danger now is the loss of quality and differentiated inputs at greater pace.

If providers choose to survive by being acquired, then research consumers need to understand what this M&A means for quality and independence. In market data we will see the opposite situation – continued cost inflation at a provider and product level, and a group of consuming firms struggling to control budgets and understand how their agreements compare to the wider market. The FCA’s Wholesale Market Data Study will finish by the end of the year, with the accompanying focus on the competitive landscape and the opacity of pricing and licensing models. Buy- and sell-side firms will also take it upon themselves to understand their data consumption more holistically and make concerted efforts to encourage greater competition and transparency wherever possible, regardless of how the regulatory situation plays out. 

Matt Barrett, CEO at Adaptive Financial Consulting: Firstly, there will be increased investment in technology across financial services and capital markets participants. In response to the opportunities created by the big tech firms stumbles, depressed valuations, and lay-offs, the use of technology to differentiate will be back as a board room topic in 2023. Secondly, cloud resilience will be high on the agenda. With financial institutions accelerating cloud adoption, rapidly moving their core infrastructure onto the cloud to save cost, enhance their ability to scale and improve access to data insights and analytics, an issue that will become increasingly top-of-mind is vulnerability to outages. As firms rely on cloud services, faults or drops in service can have a critical impact on businesses and traders that use them. Cloud resilience and high availability will therefore become a crucial topic – sophisticated trading firms need the assurance that their operations will remain consistent 24/7. Firms realise they cannot be beholden to third party outages – fault tolerant architecture and technologies will therefore become an increasingly central consideration for firms looking to build their own trading technology stack to differentiate.  

Paul Humphrey, CEO, BMLL Technologies: The race for high-quality historical data will step up in 2023 as firms look for deeper insight across the trade lifecycle. Now firms must capture the power of granular historical data to gain an edge and are more aware of what capabilities they need to implement at every stage to achieve this. Quant teams are using third party data science platforms as the foundation upon which to build research. Traders are demanding analytics that contextualise real-time activity against historical averages. Sophisticated firms are combining public and private cloud to maximise the benefit of high-quality data within their own environments at a fraction of the cost of running complex market data pipelines themselves.

All of this is predicated on high-quality data from firms who specialise in historical data, not simply as a by-product of their real-time business but built using dedicated Level 3 engineering processes as the core value proposition they bring to the market. Demand for market data derived from the most granular data available will only grow as the need for competitive edge, and correlating sophistication levels, rise. Firms that realise the predictive power of Level 3 data will understand their markets better, derive more predictive analytics, and leave those still using lower-quality data behind. 

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Matt Barrett, CEO, Adaptive

Adaptive Financial Consulting, the specialist global electronic trading consultancy, has acquired Real Logic, a low-latency trading technology development firm, The TRADE can exclusively reveal.

The deal is a strategic move for Adaptive, as it brings on board both Aeron and Aeron Cluster: open-source software used by financial firms globally and which underpin Adaptive’s development platform, Hydra Platform. This should boost the firm’s ability to deliver bespoke, low latency trading systems that can manage significant throughput, and accelerate the delivery and build of new trading solutions. Aeron and Hydra will be consolidated to become the same technology stack, with clients of each respective firm continuing to have access to their existing development teams, giving Adaptive substantially greater scale.

“Financial services firms are increasingly realising that relying on third parties for trading technology is no longer enough to compete,” Adaptive CEO Matt Barrett told The TRADE.

“Our acquisition of Real Logic helps us to go further in meeting this demand by bringing their cutting-edge Aeron and Aeron Cluster open-source development software and our development teams under one roof. The acquisition follows years of partnership between our firms and makes Adaptive a one-stop-shop for exchanges, venues, institutions and buy-side firms looking to develop and own their trading technology by offering scale, broadened expertise and technology in one place.”

Real Logic co-founder Martin Thompson, former CTO of LMAX and a recognised global expert in low latency and high performance systems, will join Adaptive as head of platform. Todd Montgomery, previously CTO of 29West and a specialist in protocol design, will also join as an engineering fellow in conjunction with the acquisition.

“Trading technology is at an inflection point,” said Thompson. “As institutions and trading firms change their approach to technology, Adaptive offers the expertise and scale to service this significant growing demand.”

Montgomery added: “Capital markets firms are increasingly realising that technology is not a cost centre, but a revenue generator. Combining forces with Adaptive will allow us to serve these firms, as firms move away from off the shelf technology, which is no longer enough to differentiate, and transition to taking front-office innovation into their own hands.”

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However, it is important that increased investment in technology is coupled with a strategy for accessing the best talent. Companies need to hire people with a deep domain knowledge of industry processes, and a solid understanding of how next-gen technologies work. Yet these types of people are going to become even harder to find next year as the competitive race for talent continues. As a result, we expect to see more custodians turning to third-party FinTech providers to access their pools of skilled, experienced personnel as much as they are for the technology itself. 

– Samir Pandiri, president of Broadridge International

We will see an acceleration of desktop consolidation across asset classes, to achieve more efficiencies and oversight. This has become a much more urgent need with the potential long term continuation of remote working. Users will also demand greater access to liquidity and execution quality, aggregated liquidity and enhanced pre- and post trade analytics. Cloud migration will be a major focus for scalability and ease of deployment purposes. The pandemic has taught the industry the importance of being able to work remotely with the right systems. As managers chase alpha, more firms will look to create quantitative trading strategies thereby increasing the need for APIs.

These will need to be smarter than prior and will need to be able to manage complex algos, pairs and gamma trading strategies. There will be a big shift in the way institutions will see crypto in 2022. The asset class will start to form part of traditional asset managers mandates and allocations to crypto assets within their funds will increase. This could potentially create operation headaches that their systems will need to overcome. Electronification of fixed income markets will continue throughout 2022 with more accurate price discovery tools and a wider range of liquidity providers distributing axes and inventory in multiple formats. Outsourcing of trading and other services will accelerate as we move to a new workplace paradigm. Recruitment challenges under the pandemic will increase the need for outsourced trading services, as will the longer-term need for remote working.

– Chris Jenkins, managing director at TORA 

 As the events of the past 18 months have shown, the need for enterprises to have flexible technologies able to handle changes in working environments has accelerated. Employees the world over found themselves displaced from their physical office spaces and thrust into a completely digital workplace, making the shortcomings and damaging repercussions of traditional operating systems and legacy technologies acutely apparent.

What’s more, employee satisfaction today is very much anchored in being provided with the right apps and technology tools within daily workflows. In 2022 expect to see a “new normal” evolve – which will see a move away from cluttered desktops, disjointed communication and disordered workflows across enterprises. Instead, the focus will be on having access to a set of tools designed to empower productivity and deliver exceptional employee experiences. Business leaders recognise that the future of work is changing. We are excited to be part of defining the path, accelerating employees towards a hyper-personalised experience.

– Adam Toms, European CEO, OpenFin

Next year will see attitudes toward front-office innovation change as it becomes increasingly clear that technology is not a cost centre but a revenue generator. Firms need to take control of their technology to differentiate and compete in the long-term. This shift in approach will drive two key themes.

The first is the increased focus on technological intensity, where institutions reduce their reliance on vendors to build their own technology to enable them to differentiate and compete. This changing approach to trading technology will drive institutions to move away from ‘off-the-peg’ technology, which is no longer enough to differentiate as they transition to taking front-office innovation into their own hands.

The second is the front office’s shift to the cloud. While the back and middle-office’s migration to the cloud is well established, the front-office has been slower to make the leap. Attitudes are changing however, and businesses are realising that the cloud is secure, powerful and gives firms easy access to rich data and analytics. We can expect to see front office infrastructure increasingly moving to the cloud, as it becomes the centre of a new financial ecosystem that will become increasingly integral to institutions’ operations.

– Matt Barrett, CEO of Adaptive Financial Consulting

Over the past couple of years, initiatives such as FDC3 have made great strides to solve the challenges associated with delivering actionable intelligence and workflow focus to the desktops of trading teams. These open standards reduce the friction of data movement and application interoperability to increase speed, quality and efficiency of trading-decision making.

With proven solutions to plumb data increasingly commonplace, the next 12 months will inevitably see software vendor focus free up from solving aggregation and connectivity issues to delivering value-adding innovation. Consequently, previously tied up resources will be allocated to developing and providing cutting-edge new technology that dramatically pushes workflows forward. In 2022, those who move ahead of the pack and differentiate will be the firms working closely with clients to understand their current needs and future requirements. As a result, they will optimise their thinking and technology around the user and experience rather than grappling with customising legacy workflows. Augmenting traders with automation and alerting, driven by actionable intelligence, represents the next generation of front-office technology.

 – Andy Mahoney, managing director, FlexTrade EMEA

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