Delivering the Ecosystem of Tomorrow’s Capital Markets: Building a Strong Foundation of Excellence
If you’ve found your way to this blog, you may already be aware that the team at Trading Technologies is doing something extraordinary in technology and capital markets. We have assembled best-in-class tech talent to capitalize on a generational opportunity leveraging the unique assets TT has built in recent years. This is going to be a team to watch in the months ahead.
Those are some bold claims; allow me to elaborate. Trading Technologies has been a market leader in listed derivatives execution management tools for many years, assembling an enviable customer roster of tier one capital markets companies, including all of the top 20 global futures brokers. We have completed a decade-long re-platforming, with a tech stack built from scratch to meet the rapidly evolving needs of our sophisticated customers.
Over the past 10 years, we have built the foundational operating layer for listed derivatives trade execution. Today, we can run the whole ecosystem of trading on our platform, which is multi-tenanted and delivered entirely via Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). No other company in capital markets has made such a substantial investment in the future.
Now our focus is on expansion across asset classes and functionality, building on the robust foundation to deliver unrivaled value to our global, multi-asset client base.
What We Have Built
I have the benefit of speaking with many external parties from customers and vendors to technologists, thought leaders and folks eager to join our team. There is a very common response when they understand the technology and platform we’ve built: excitement and a bit of awe.
We built the TT platform on a hybrid architecture. The foundation is in colocated, fully managed (by us) data centers around the world while simultaneously leveraging the cloud for non-latency-sensitive operations and data storage and retrieval.
The TT platform is a single interconnected ecosystem which connects the buy side, sell side, venues and third-party providers with one another to facilitate their trading operations. Once a new node (i.e., customer or venue) is introduced to the ecosystem, it is immediately available to the rest of the platform ecosystem participants.
We have done the hard work to normalize all data flowing into or through the platform, and then we store that data in the cloud. It allows us to do incredibly innovative things, such as providing single-click access to new products and services that historically would have taken weeks or months to deploy. As an example, any customer trading on the TT platform can enable best-in-class transaction cost analysis (TCA) or trade surveillance with zero setup, installation or onboarding processes.
Our Focus on Service Excellence
We spend a lot of time thinking about how we can safely deliver mission-critical services at scale. Underlying everything we do, stability, resiliency and service excellence will always be the most important features.
I took over as EVP of Product Development and CTO in March 2023, a role which has since evolved to become Chief Platform Officer in October 2024. Under the new, expanded role I am responsible for the newly integrated Platform Services business unit which merges Product Development, Services and Infrastructure into a single group.
On day one as CTO, I changed our team’s priorities to align with a simple vision for engineering and product development: do the fundamentals excellently. If we wanted to reach our goals of executing our ambitious platform strategy, we first had to become excellent at delivering the product we already had. Not just good, but the best. Only then could we aspire to do more.
As of March 2023, some of our most acute challenges were around software quality and platform resiliency.
To address the software quality issues, I established four key principles for everyone in product development:
- We test our software. Software quality is everyone’s responsibility. It starts with product managers writing real-world test cases, engineers testing their own changes and of course our QA team being the best in the industry. We started measuring and monitoring escaped defects. We put a heavy emphasis on developer testing and eliminating defects escaped to our testing group.
- We automate our testing. The simple fact is that manual testing doesn’t scale. We embraced test automation, with the first step being to measure test automation coverage. We initially had to baseline how well our automated tests covered our existing codebase, and then we needed to start the journey of increasing test automation coverage over time.
- When bugs happen, we fix those first. Bugs happen. Our principle is that before we build new features, we fix the bugs that have been found with our existing product. To accomplish this, we introduced defect resolution service-level agreements (SLAs). Previously, many valid defects were found but were permanently relegated to the backlog. In addition to a commitment to fix new bugs, we allocated 20% of each team’s capacity to working down the existing defect backlog.
- We are experts at stressing and breaking our own product. The final priority to start to break the back of production instability was investing in hunting down our pre-existing platform weaknesses and latent (unknown) defects. We called this “chaos engineering.”
The other immediate challenge was addressing overall platform resiliency and durability. In the spirit of doing the basics very well – whenever we face a challenge, we focus on exhaustive analysis and we hunt for the truth. We needed to root out and put all our shortcomings on the table so we could build plans and programs to address them. This resulted in large programs of investment around technical debt, platform architecture, resilience, data integrity and capacity management.
Approaching our greatest challenges with this focus on the basics and doing the fundamentals with excellence has allowed us to deliver significant improvement in both software quality and overall system reliability.
Some examples of how we measure progress are:
- Introduced (and improved) escaped defect metrics and defect resolution SLAs
- 70% reduction in escaped defects
- Introduced defect resolution SLAs
- 55% reduction in defect backlog
- 25% increase in test automation coverage
- 85% reduction in major service incidents
- Introduced chaos engineering as a discipline to hunt down platform weaknesses
The Ecosystem of the Future
Doing the fundamentals well affords us the opportunity to aspire to much greater ambitions.
From a technology and platform architecture perspective, we are designing and building a platform that can go far beyond where the original TT platform could go. We are doing the hard work to do the right things, the right way. Our mission is to leverage best-in-class technology to deliver substantial value to customers. Our technology strategy is to continue to achieve the benefits of integration and a single interconnected ecosystem while delivering the service reliability and excellence our customers demand.
This core TT platform is the foundational layer of what we offer to clients and how we layer in new, innovative products and services. On top of the core platform, we are building new functionality, integrating acquisitions and introducing third-party partners to constantly enhance the value of being a TT customer.
As an example, we launched TT Futures TCA last June. Any current futures customer that is trading on TT or sending their data on the TCA platform can start receiving TCA reports. They don’t have to sign a new vendor agreement or integrate any new data into the platform; they can just click a button, start a free trial and, if they like it, turn it on long term.
As another example, we completed the acquisition of ATEO earlier this year. Following that, we have taken a legacy middle-office, deployed application and transitioned it to a managed service – meaning that any TT client that needs a best-in-class middle-office product can buy it through their existing contract with TT. We will soon integrate the exchange feed handlers and centralize all data from the front office through the other side of the clearing house.
One final example is our acquisition of RCM-X and their algo suite in 2022. Any TT client can now configure, risk check and deploy any of those best-in-class algos, which we now call TT Premium Order Types, on the platform alongside their other TT services.
TT is doing the hard work to deliver more value to customers through a single platform and from a trusted partner. We are building an ecosystem that will provide the foundation of something far bigger than what we can build alone. Ultimately, we intend to allow clients and third-party partners to build on the platform.
Our promise is that if a client invests with us now, they will get more value out of being a TT client in the long term than with any other software company in the world. This is an exciting time to be at TT, and we look forward to partnering with our clients to build the ecosystem of tomorrow’s capital markets.