Trading Technologies Plots Evolution Away from Screens

As part of this, TT will evolve to focus on three distinct brackets—trading, infrastructure, and data—which he announced in a blog post just before the start of this year’s Futures Industry Association (FIA) conference in Boca Raton.

“I put the headline [on the blog post] that TT is no longer a screen company to be kind of controversial, but the reality is that will always be a big part of our DNA,” says Lane. “But I do think we’ve—probably for longer than I’d like to admit—had a very unique asset in our global network and backbone, which was really all built to serve one purpose, and that was to be a screen company. For too long, I think, we’ve under-utilized that.”

What the vendor has been figuring out for the past few years, he says, is how it can put together a compelling platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering, now that the industry has become comfortable with and used to the model through using the likes of Amazon Web Services and the Google Cloud Platform.

It can be a complex task. Lane cites examples ranging from usage by big, multinational banks through to small brokers that may want turnkey access to Asian markets.

“We’ve got the infrastructure to power all of those types of solutions, so we’re now starting to package them up and offer them,” he said. “That’s what I think you’ll see a lot more of from TT moving forward. Screens will obviously be the biggest part of our DNA, I suspect, but we’re leveraging our investment we’ve made in other areas, in many ways.”

Founded in 1994, in Frankfurt, Germany, TT’s first product was X_Trader, which offered connectivity to Deutsche Börse at the time. From there, the company has expanded greatly, with its launch of MD Trader in 2000; Autospreader and Autotrader in 2002; its acquisition of Tickit Trading Systems in 2010, which gave it access to the Algo Design Lab visual programming interface; and its launch of a multibroker trading solution in 2013.

The first signs that TT was beginning to change came in 2017, when the firm acquired a machine-learning-powered surveillance outfit, named Neurensic, pushing TT into a brand new field. Then, just last week, the firm went live with its bridge between cryptocurrency and futures markets, allowing the use of professional-grade trading and hedging tools on the GDAX digital currency exchange.

The other key plank of TT’s future state is how it uses data. The Neurensic acquisition, which has become TT Score, has provided valuable lessons for TT in how it can use the information taken in through its systems, but Lane is the first to admit that the firm is “still figuring out what it is, and how we can best allow clients to extract value from that data.”

“The easy part—well, it’s not exactly easy—is figuring out how we capture and store the data, so any trading firm can access their data immediately,” he says. “We’re talking trillions of rows of data, petabytes of data. Storing that efficiently is one thing, retrieving that in a fast way is another, and doing both of those is a challenge, but what it enables is our solutions like TT Score and feeding that platform with five years of data, or billions and trillions of records.”

This allows for forensic analysis of historical activity, Lane says. Whereas in the past this might have involved a compliance staffer finding the right box and the right tape, then spending weeks analyzing the data from it, firms will be able to do things like check their activity on a specific day several years ago and see if there were any red flags or breaches, in a relatively short amount of time.

“I think we’re really just scratching the surface on marrying access to that type of data with really compelling solutions like Score, or algo back testing,” Lane says. “But that’s, I think, over the next 12 to 24 months, where we’re going to invest.”