FIA Boca 2025: The Key Technology Trends Shaping the Industry
This week, the derivatives industry heads to the sunny climes of Florida for the 50th edition of the seminal event of the year: FIA Boca.
Boca is unique and unlike any forum I’ve seen in any industry in terms of bringing together the most important players. The conference hosts the sell side, the buy side, exchanges, associations, regulators, technology providers, media and others from all over the world.
To my mind, there are two key technology trends that will form the discussions this year: front-to-back integration and the move to multi-asset trading.
Front-to-Back Integration
When I entered this industry, there was a front office and a back office. These were distinct entities, both in terms of people and technology – effectively two separate worlds. Today, across the market, there is a drive to integrate trading workflows front to back.
For some time now, the process of sending messages, such as allocations between front-office and back-office systems, has been automated but there has been little visibility of a trade in the front office once it has been sent. The trader hasn’t had a view on whether the trade has been processed or perhaps has failed because it was missing a product code or it was rejected by the clearing broker.
It is this two-way interaction between the front and back office that the industry is now looking to address.
This trend has the potential to make the industry much more efficient by removing the end-of-day scramble to allocate trades and resolve breaks before the clearing deadline.
Front-to-back integration brings other benefits. If you look at margining, firms across the market must hold massive amounts of cash at various brokers and clearing houses as a result of uncertainty over the size of margin calls.
The more information firms can get in real time, the more efficient they can be in their treasury functions and cash and liquidity management.
Multi-Asset Trading
The second key technology trend that we see at TT is the move to multi-asset integration.
This mirrors our evolution here at TT.
For almost three decades, TT was a futures trading platform. That has changed as we have responded to client demand to reduce front-office complexity and to build out multi-asset capabilities.
Across the market today, firms are using multiple front-office systems to trade different asset classes. We are putting everything on one platform. Regardless of where your liquidity source is, whether it’s a listed exchange to trade equity futures or a broker to trade foreign exchange (FX), you will be able to access that liquidity using the same trading platform, monitored with the same surveillance system and inspected with the same transaction cost analysis (TCA) – whatever asset class you are trading.
That is what we mean when we say multi-asset. It isn’t just the same execution management system (EMS), it’s being able to get data and analytics across all of the asset classes you trade on one common platform – and the ability to clear and allocate across everything you are doing without jumping between systems.
From a technology perspective, it is a challenging process to develop true multi-asset capabilities. You must consider the entire workflow, front-to-back, high-touch to zero-touch. You need to look at the trade life cycle outside the confines of a monolithic EMS or back office.
At TT, we have re-architected our platform to reflect the demands of cross-asset capabilities. Traders in all asset classes need market connectivity, they need gateways to liquidity sources, risk management and surveillance, etc.
But in each asset class, the post-execution workflows can be very different. We have built a platform that mitigates these differences to provide seamless trading between asset classes.
Using TT, a trader can execute a futures trade and put on an FX hedge or trade a cash treasury using the same GUI and platform. They can get a view on their total risk using the same data across all the asset classes they are trading. This is truly multi-asset.
A Personal Industry
The 50th edition of Boca is a chance to reflect on the past but also to look ahead, and I am really optimistic about the future of our industry.
As a multinational business, FIA Boca is a unique opportunity for TT to meet all our stakeholders in one place to hear what is going on across the market.
One of the things I love about listed derivatives is that while we are a global industry driven by technology, we are ultimately a people business, and Boca plays an essential role in bringing people together. The fact that Boca is still going from strength-to-strength after 50 years is testament to this fact.
As I reflect on my 20 years of attending Boca, it is interesting how the conversation has evolved. When the floors closed, the big concern was that it would be difficult to bring new people into the industry, and this certainly was a challenge in the past.
But if you look at the younger generation entering the market today, they are technology-savvy and deeply involved in trading. From Bitcoin to GameStop, the younger generation has grown up with trading as part of their culture, and these are the people who will develop the industry of the next 50 years. And they are going to want highly sophisticated trading tools.
I am going to Boca this year with significant optimism about the future of the industry and TT’s ability to offer the front-to-back, multi-asset trading technology that will support the markets of tomorrow.