Nasdaq and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have expanded their strategic partnership, announcing that Nasdaq’s Calypso platform will now be available as a fully managed service on AWS. The move aims to provide financial institutions with a modernised, resilient, and scalable infrastructure for their capital markets and treasury operations.
The offering sees Nasdaq managing the underlying technology of its front-to-back-office capital markets platform, allowing banks and asset managers to accelerate their cloud adoption, streamline operations, and focus on innovation rather than infrastructure maintenance.The partnership addresses a critical challenge facing many financial institutions: the need to innovate and adapt to rapid market changes while being constrained by complex and fragmented legacy systems. By delivering Calypso as a managed service, the Nasdaq aims to lower the barrier to modernisation, ensuring clients are always on the most advanced version of the platform while benefiting from the security and scale of AWS.
Speaking about the partnership, Magnus Haglind, Head of Capital markets Technology at Nasdaq, explains that the move is a direct response to several powerful forces reshaping the industry.
“With the Calypso and AWS partnership, we are addressing several significant market trends,” he says. “The first is the move towards an ‘always-on’ environment, driven by settlement acceleration, 24/5 equity markets, and the rise of digital assets and crypto. This means more systems are becoming mission-critical. Our collaboration with AWS is designed to provide the resilience and reliability that the future of global markets will demand. The second major trend is the need for interoperability and integration to unlock the value of data. Many of our clients already use other solutions on AWS.”
He continues: “By deploying Calypso as a managed service on AWS, we are lowering the barriers to interoperability with other parts of a bank’s existing infrastructure. Finally, with the current drive for modernisation, firms are looking for immediate help and accelerators. To unlock innovation and investment in necessary new areas, consuming an advanced, front-to-back trade management solution as a managed service can be a major accelerator, rather than embarking on a major transformation programme. These are the three key trends underpinning this announcement.”
A key benefit highlighted in the announcement is the ability for firms to create a more agile and unified environment for managing trading, risk, margin, and collateral workflows. The approach is designed to reduce friction in data flows between systems, simplify data architecture, and empower the use of advanced AI analytics to improve efficiency.
This focus on data and integration is crucial for firms looking to move beyond siloed operations and leverage their data assets more effectively. Haglind elaborates on the practicalities of data integration, stating that the platform provides flexible options for clients.
“The richness of the Calypso platform generates significant interest from firms wanting to connect to different modules, retrieve information, and mix it with other data sets for analytics,” he says. “Calypso offers a variety of data integration capabilities, including REST APIs and file transfers, depending on client preferences. We are approaching this in two ways. We can offer a purpose-built data lake or a platform that sits alongside a client’s enterprise system to facilitate easier integration with Calypso-specific data sets. Alternatively, clients can connect via API, retrieve the information, and push it to their own data lake.”
The partnership promises further benefits, including a joint commitment to innovation across digital assets and AI, with access to tools like the AWS elastic data grid for faster risk calculations. It also provides a framework for standardised implementation and regular updates to meet evolving regulatory mandates, enhancing operational efficiency with a simplified testing environment and the flexibility to tailor data flows.
This collaboration marks another significant milestone in the financial industry’s shift towards cloud-based, managed service models, positioning Nasdaq and AWS to lead what Haglind calls an “industry-wide transformation.”
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