Building Our Core Platform—the Operating System of Capital Markets
Trading Technologies was traditionally a futures and options business. But today we are a multi-asset company on a path to building the operating system of capital markets. Our goal is to provide seamless, integrated access to best-of-breed applications and datasets, enabling customers across every role and function to power their trading workflows more effectively than traditional financial services technology providers.
At the center of this vision is TT—a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform delivering “multi-X” solutions, with “X” representing asset classes, products, workflows, features and geographies. The platform is operating at scale, with core capabilities firmly in place, and much of the heavy lifting is behind us. Access to futures and options, foreign exchange (FX) and cryptocurrencies is fully integrated, with order and execution management augmented by fully integrated quantitative trading and trade surveillance. Looking ahead, we will add fixed income, which is currently offered but not yet integrated, and equities, alongside new functionality for data and analytics, compliance, and clearing and post-trade allocation.
We believe that the sum of all our parts adds more business value than the individual components. The platform is not just about TT products and services, but a broader ecosystem in which we will allow our partners and clients to onboard their own applications and datasets, customize their workflows—and even develop their own apps.
Overcoming Fragmentation
From a product perspective, we can eliminate the fragmented user experience that clients often encounter when working with a portfolio of different applications. TT has acquired several companies over the past three years to support our strategy to offer our multi-X trading platform.
In this respect, we are not alone. Consolidation has been a key theme of capital markets technology for over a decade. However, our peers in the industry have taken a different approach to post-acquisition integration of companies—they typically acquire companies and run them as a portfolio.
All too often, this means different applications and products built on different tech stacks. Some might be cloud-based, some desktop installs. There is no single sign-on, no single user interface, no coherent user experience. The look, feel and performance of each product can be very different. In short, under the portfolio approach, products are not integrated, and workflows and data cannot be embedded and optimized.
Doing It Differently
What we are doing is very different. We don’t want the companies we acquire to be separate applications. Clients will be able to spin up different applications to make up their workflows depending on their function, role and permissions. If I am a sales trader, I will have applications specific to my needs in that role. Similarly, if I’m a market maker, an execution trader or a compliance officer, I will be able to access the applications and workflows central to my role—all on the same platform with a consolidated data feed.
Although many of these applications will have been acquired by TT, they will be accessible on the TT platform with a single look and feel. There will also be a coherent user experience, with embedded workflows and seamless interoperability across applications.
Essentially, we are bringing the digital experience and functionality that people have on their phones to their desktop. Our customers and partners will also be able to create their own apps and data products, as well as extending and customizing APIs, to suit their business needs. In addition, they will be able to leverage our distribution network for new business opportunities.
Ultimately, it’s about the network effect. The TT platform is not just about TT, it’s also about the broader ecosystem across capital markets.
Updating Capital Markets Technology
When it comes to platform-based technology, capital markets are far behind the curve. If you look outside financial services, you see platforms everywhere. Amazon is a platform, Google is a platform. Our phones are powered by operating systems. We can go to an app store and download all the apps we need. And most importantly, the apps all interoperate. You can take a photo on one app and share it through another.
At TT, we saw a clear opportunity to bring that same digital experience to the front, middle and back offices of the capital markets. That’s what our clients want—an integrated experience, being able to work across best-of-breed applications, not having to search for data, but having the data come to them.
This is the integrated platform that we have built and are now actively evolving.
While there is more to do to fully realize the complexity of our vision to become the operating system of capital markets, the heaviest lift is behind us. We have already fundamentally shifted how TT customers engage with capital markets and the systems and data that drive their businesses.
Now our focus is on extending the platform to cover more use cases across capital markets. For example, we’re currently integrating transaction cost analysis (TCA), with pre- and post-trade analytics embedded into O/EMS workflows. And there will be much more to come as we will continue to add more services, data, applications and workflows to the platform.
Reach out to find out more about how our multi-asset trading platform can streamline your trading workflows.