Waypoint Trading Solutions has launched Wayfinder, a new service designed to help financial institutions manage the growing volume of operational and market-data changes communicated by exchanges.
Built into Waypoint’s existing Data Notification Manager (DNM) platform and developed in partnership with SEAD Software, Wayfinder uses AI to ingest exchange notifications and convert unstructured information into standardised data that can be classified, filtered and routed through operational workflows.
The launch addresses a longstanding problem for market-data and infrastructure teams. Exchanges continually introduce new products, alter fee schedules, change network configurations, migrate data centres and update protocols, but the information firms need to manage those changes still tends to arrive in documents and emails designed for people to read rather than systems to process.Wayfinder adds direct exchange notifications to the vendor notices already handled through DNM. Waypoint says it connects to more than 800 exchanges, venues and service providers globally, giving the company a sizeable information-management problem of its own as well as one shared by its clients.
Going directly to the exchange provides an important additional layer of information, according to Jeff Mezger, VP of Product Management at Waypoint Trading Solutions,
“You get all these notifications from the vendors, but it’s a bit of a telephone game,” he tells TradingTech Insight. “They’re taking something the exchange is doing and telling us how it impacts them, but some of the context can be lost. You may want to see the actual source and what the exchange initially said the change was going to be. We already had a tool that could take this firehose of information and put it into a single pane of glass, so it was a natural evolution to add the direct exchange notifications.”
Turning notices into data
There is no common standard for exchange notifications. Notices arrive in different formats and can range from relatively routine events such as index rebalances to technical changes that require months of preparation.
Wayfinder uses AI to impose structure on that information, identifying and tagging different categories such as commercial changes, technical changes and new listings. Those classifications can then be used by DNM’s existing filtering and alerting capabilities to determine which information should reach particular teams.
A commercial team, for example, may have little interest in a network configuration change that requires action from technology staff. Conversely, technical teams don’t need every commercial policy update or product notification passing through their workflow.
That makes classification important, but also raises the consequences of getting it wrong. Missing or misinterpreting a change could result in anything from an unexpected licence cost to disruption of a market-data service. Waypoint therefore combines AI processing with expert human review rather than relying entirely on automated classification.
“As you look at a given exchange or a given feed, you start to get comfortable with it,” notes Mezger. “When you’re reviewing every notification, you eventually reach the point where you think you’ve got that one solved and can automate some of it. I think we’ll still always put eyes on it, but we can expedite the process and rely on the AI model more to do the heavy lifting. There will probably always be some level of human review, but that involvement should taper off as we train the model.”
The model is therefore one of graduated automation rather than a wholesale removal of human oversight. Feedback from reviewers is used to improve the AI’s treatment of particular exchanges and feeds, allowing more of the processing work to be automated as confidence increases.
Mapping the impact of change
Structuring the notification also opens the possibility of connecting an exchange-driven change to other information held within a firm’s market data and trading infrastructure, and Waypoint already has some of those connections.
“You see how they start to knit together,” says Mezger. “Our Data Notification Manager historically integrates with entitlement systems. It doesn’t just identify what the change is; it can identify specific users impacted by the change. We can start to integrate all these tools. Our entitlement management tool, Archon, can be integrated directly with Wayfinder to give that extra level of analysis. That’s definitely the roadmap we see going forward – tighter integration between all the tools we’re building that relate to trading operations.”
That roadmap potentially takes the model beyond notification management towards dependency mapping. An exchange protocol change could be associated with a particular feed, the applications dependent on it, the users affected and ultimately the technical team responsible for implementing the necessary change.
The distinction between what Wayfinder does today and where that model could lead is important. Much of the immediate value lies in bringing order to a fragmented flow of information and directing it towards the right people. Deeper integration with entitlement and operational systems could allow firms to determine the downstream consequences of a change rather than simply identifying that the change has occurred.
Waypoint has an unusually direct testing ground for that development because it operates the same type of infrastructure its customers are trying to manage.
“These are challenges we face directly in our own business, and that’s one of the reasons I’m excited about these tools – because we use them heavily internally,” says Mezger. “It’s not about guessing what a given firm may need. We have people using them every day internally, and that helps us identify problems or areas for improvement and address them before a client necessarily asks for them.”
For market-data teams, the value could extend well beyond managing notifications. Connecting exchange changes to the feeds, applications and entitlements they affect would give firms a clearer picture of what needs to be done, who needs to do it and when.
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