Following our recent highly successful TradingTech Summit in London, A-Team’s TradingTech Insight Briefing returns to New York on June 16, after a two-year hiatus due to the Covid pandemic. As always, industry practitioners will gather in person to discuss the latest trends, challenges and innovations in trading technology, and network with their peers at the in-person event in Midtown Manhattan.
The event will focus on the role of technology as a differentiating factor in today’s increasingly digital and cloud-based world, across both traditional asset classes and the fast-evolving digital asset markets.
The afternoon’s sessions kick off with a fireside chat between A-Team Group’s President & Chief Content Officer Andrew Delaney and Nikhil Singhvi, Managing Director – Core Trading Technology at Credit Suisse, who will discuss some lessons learnt from the last year and how new trends around digital assets and ESG are impacting the trading landscape. The pair will cover a range of topics, including talent, skills and diversity, and innovation around digital transformation and trading technology.
The first panel session of the day will focus on modernizing trading platforms and how to leverage technology to differentiate and create a best-in-class trading platform, with representatives from Scotiabank, Two Sigma Investments and Adaptive Financial Consulting.
“There’s no longer a debate on this, you need quality technology to compete,” says Fergus Keenan, Chief Strategy Officer at Adaptive. “So it’s really about understanding what tools are at your disposal, looking at the trends to openness and interoperability, and taking a long-term view on where to invest, and how to use those tools to create opportunities to differentiate. With competition for talent at an all-time high, you need to leverage work that other people have done, open source being a great example, and find the right partners with the experience of delivering solutions into production.”
The next panel, ‘A hybrid approach for moving your trading platform to the cloud’, with Fabrice Scialom of RBC moderating, will feature expert speakers from Deutsche Bank Innovation Labs and Options Technology, discussing topics around cloud migration, latency considerations, practicalities of transitioning to a devops approach, and some lessons learnt.
“Whether for a cloud-native new build or migrating a legacy platform to the cloud, people are looking at what the cloud can give them beyond their current capabilities,” says Keenan. “A good example would be using the cloud provider’s built-in tooling to unlock data that was previously unavailable, and to gain insights from that data.”
The third panel session, moderated by Nigel Cheetham of Synechron, will focus on optimising trading infrastructures for high performance and agility in fast markets. Representatives from TD Securities, Credit Suisse and Exegy will discuss the latest trends in connectivity and networks, trade infrastructure monitoring, developments in co-location, hosting and data centres, and the current vendor landscape. “In our discussions with clients about high performance, it’s really important to define what you mean by that,” says Keenan. “Because it means different things to different people and impacts everything, from the architecture right through to the functionality. We’ve seen people make the mistake of trying to retrofit performance capabilities into functionally-rich builds. So don’t over-optimise too early for performance, but do keep communicating performance requirements through each stage of development so everybody is aligned.”
The final panel, ‘Accessing liquidity in digital assets: Connecting and trading in the emerging exchange landscape’, moderated by Kathryn Zhao of Cantor Fitzgerald, will explore how trading venues are evolving for digital asset trading. Industry experts from State Street, BNY Mellon, and Perella Weinberg Partners, will discuss price transparency, sourcing liquidity, connectivity and hosting issues for managing digital assets, and the role of smart order routers and execution algorithms.
“On the institutional side, the buy side wants exposure to crypto and digital assets,” says Keenan. “So the banks need to prepare for regulation, they need to be agile and to break away from their traditional silos in order to be in a position to offer that exposure.”
The event will conclude with networking drinks and the TradingTech Insight USA Award Winners Ceremony. With space limited, we recommend early registration to avoid disappointment.Subscribe to our newsletter
