Trading Technologies Sees Increased Adoption of Cloud-Based Platform, Sets Sights on New Coverage Areas

Two years ago, Trading Technologies launched it’s cloud-based, software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivered TT trading platform to be the eventual successor to its X_Trader platform, which is more than 20 years old.

The first 18 months saw minimal adoption of the new offering, but Rick Lane, TT’s CEO, says the vendor's client base is finally starting to sign up. Speaking with Waters at this year’s FIA Boca conference, Lane says user adoption has jumped from 1 percent six months ago to 10 percent today.

“It’s finally happening now. It’s no longer the next-generation platform; it’s the current generation platform,” he says. “A lot of firms wanted not only to see feature parity and market parity, they just wanted to see the thing become real and be in the market for some period of time.”

To accompany this growth, Chicago-based TT has added new functionalities and is looking to roll into new asset classes in the coming month. Part of this includes the recently launched TT Desktop, which was made in partnership with OpenFin and allows for the support of up to 18 monitors. Even if 18 monitors seems like overkill, this functionality is aimed at the most sophisticated users.

“We wanted to make sure that there wasn’t a use-case that we couldn’t support on this platform,” Lane says. “Now that that’s out, I suspect we’ll see this acceleration continue.”

Display dozens of MD Trader windows across multiple monitors in a single workspace with TT Desktop. \#PreviewTT pic.twitter.com/A6cP63zGJE

— Trading Technologies (@Trading_Tech) January 28, 2015

TT is also looking to expand its reach in the coming year. It is finding success in targeting trading firms that were priced out of the old software, but the cloud platform has allowed them to bring firms like utility companies that are looking to trade European power and gas. While they couldn’t afford—or at least didn’t care to spend—a hard install for the X_Trader platform, TT gives them sophisticated tools at a reduced cost.

“We have firms that our using our options workflows in production, which is greenfield for TT,” he says. “We’ve never really supported a proper options workflow, but now people are using it and we see a lot of opportunities to grow on the heels of that.”

He says that looking ahead, Trading Technologies will look to expand past its futures and options wheelhouse into other asset classes, first with cash equities—though not US cash equities, at least at first.

Underestimate

Lane says that five years ago, when the vendor was in the research and development phase for what would become the TT platform, it probably underestimated some of the “institutional headwind” from partner firms that had built businesses around hosting TT’s servers, software and its network, which would be threatened by this new model.

Furthermore, while cloud adoption has grown significantly in the capital markets, there were still some holdouts that needed to be coaxed into this new paradigm.

“We probably underestimated some of the irrational concerns and people opposing change and being uncomfortable with ‘new.' Today there’s not a major bank that you would go to that is in some capacity isn’t using the cloud, so a lot of that is now behind us,” he says. “We also underestimated just how much of an education process this would be to go to a security group within a bank and put their minds at ease to show that the cloud is likely safer—in broad terms—than what they’re doing on their likely outdated IT practices and that TT’s use of the cloud was meeting their best-practices high standards—things like encryption at rest, encryption in transit.”