Adaptive, a provider of trading technology solutions based on the latest technologies and techniques, and a platinum sponsor of next week’s A-Team Group TradingTech Summit London, is pushing the boundaries to reduce the overall cost of innovation and delivery of novel capital markets products. Ahead of the event, we talked to Adaptive CEO and co-founder Matt Barrett about the company’s approach.
A-Team:. What do you see as the biggest challenge facing our trading technology marketplace as it comes out of the pandemic?
Matt Barrett: The trading technology marketplace has performed admirably during the pandemic, but the pace of innovation needs to speed up to adjust to significant market structure changes. The emergence of retail investors as a genuine force and the institutionalisation of digital assets and decentralised finance are just some of the factors driving dynamic changes that trading technology firms need to adjust for.
Finding ways to capitalise on this changing environment by using traditional know-how and experience, combined with more modern technology approaches and leveraging existing strengths, will determine the winners and losers as we emerge into the new normal.
A-Team: How do Adaptive solutions help address these challenges?
Matt Barrett: Innovation is difficult, and breaking ground on a new technology delivery – successfully going from v0.0 to v1.0 – is incredibly challenging, even if travelling a familiar road. Innovation obviously occurs on an unfamiliar road, so reducing delivery risk is critical to ensure focus can be given to innovation and delivering the right thing for clients.
For capital markets firms, we bring years of expertise in delivering novel solutions – starting from scratch, and getting a new product, platform or system into production. We have invested in a proprietary platform that solves the hard systems engineering problems of trading technology solutions – problems that are still, today, some of the hardest in computer science.
By partnering with Adaptive, our clients get to leverage our expertise and knowledge in delivering from scratch, as well as gain access to our accelerator platform to reduce the overall cost of innovation and delivery of a truly novel capital markets solution. Yet while doing so, they retain ownership of the delivered solution and control their own future.
This lets them be nimble and innovative, and take advantage of emerging market trends and get to market quicker than the competition. And when they get to market, they can keep innovating in response to changing market conditions and their competitors.
In addition, with our recent acquisition of Real Logic, the maintainers of Aeron and Aeron Cluster, we are embracing an open core model that harnesses the value of an open source community as well as the capabilities of world leading experts. By building on top of an increasingly broadly adopted open source technology, our clients benefit from the huge innovation that comes from open source.
A-Team: How can firms address the skills shortage that is currently hindering progress in the field?
Matt Barrett: Many firms in the trading technology marketplace have historically suffered from the ‘not invented here’ problem and had the luxury of bloated technology teams to absorb the inefficiency created by this mentality. This is no longer an option to compete in the current environment.
Firms need to identify and embrace the best technology solutions available to them, putting their business objectives at the fore. This means partnering with the right firms that can give a boost to delivery capability and leave a firm in control of its future without adding additional technical burden. It also means having a laser-like focus on exactly the areas of technological differentiation, aligned with business goals, that will bring a firm the return on investment it needs.
A-Team: What will Adaptive be speaking about at our upcoming TradingTech Summit?
Matt Barrett: We’ll be speaking about the changing reality of technical innovation, and how capital markets technology is undergoing the same phase change in velocity that consumer and retail firms experienced about ten years ago. There will be similarities and differences to how this plays out in capital markets. One of the differences will be what change looks like in a hugely complicated interconnected ecosystem like that of the sell-side, buy-side, vendors and other market participants that will be at the TradingTech Summit.
A-Team: What do you see as the benefits of sponsoring the TradingTech Summit?
Mark Barrett: The casual, unplanned conversations that occur at a conference full of open, like-minded individuals, are the best way I know of to be exposed to generally new and interesting ideas. People have realised what they were missing through the various lockdowns we’ve had. Sponsoring TradingTech Summit is our way of stating – to our staff, clients, and the wider market – that innovation and collaboration are important, and that taking the time to meet with each other to have those unscheduled, unscripted discussions – and to meet new people – is invaluable.
If you would like to hear more from Adaptive, be sure to book your ticket for TradingTech Summit London, where you can learn more about the company and hear from many other industry experts. You can check out the event speakers here.
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