The conversation around trading technology has become more exacting over the past year. AI is moving into production environments. Data estates are being rationalised and rebuilt. Infrastructure decisions are increasingly shaped by resilience, transparency and regulatory pressure.
Against that backdrop, A-Team Group’s TradingTech Summit London 2026 takes place at a time when firms are reassessing not just tooling, but the structure of their trading stacks.
AI: From Concept to Controlled Deployment
The early cycle of AI experimentation is giving way to implementation. For trading firms that have discovered where AI might add value, a key question is how it can be introduced without compromising control.
Embedding AI-driven analytics into order routing, execution decision support or surveillance requires more than model accuracy. It demands governance frameworks, explainability, and operational oversight. It also requires careful integration with latency-sensitive systems.The emphasis this year is therefore on operational discipline: how AI components are supervised, measured and constrained within production environments.
Performance, Measurability and Trust
At the infrastructure level, performance remains critical, but the definition of performance is evolving.
“From what we see working closely with our customers, performance decisions have always involved trade-offs beyond raw latency, but what has changed is how explicitly those trade-offs are now assessed and prioritised,” notes Diana Stanescu, Director Finance and Capital Markets at Keysight Technologies. “Today, the challenge is delivering sub-microsecond infrastructure that remains measurable, explainable, and resilient under real market conditions. As regulatory scrutiny and market fragmentation increase, companies are prioritising architectures where performance is provable, trustworthy, and sustainable over time.”
The shift is subtle but important. The focus on provable performance and resilience runs through the Summit agenda, particularly in sessions addressing infrastructure design and operational risk.
Data Platform Modernisation
Data strategy is undergoing a similar recalibration. Rather than simply acquiring additional datasets, the firms gaining ground are rethinking how data flows through their environments, from ingestion to analytics to monitoring.
Nicolas Hourcard, Co-founder and CEO of QuestDB, frames the issue directly: “The firms gaining a real edge in trading infrastructure are the ones rethinking their entire data stack, from high-throughput ingestion through real-time querying for pre- and post-trade analysis, to full observability, rather than just optimising at the network layer. I’m looking forward to exploring those architectural decisions with this panel and discussing how firms can achieve that performance without the complexity and vendor lock-in of legacy solutions.”
The implication is clear. Optimising the network layer in isolation is no longer enough. Competitive advantage increasingly depends on coherent, end-to-end data architectures capable of supporting real-time analysis and oversight.
Sessions on data platform modernisation and event-driven processing reflect that broader shift: data engineering as a front-office capability, not a support function.
Resilience, Cyber and the Quantum Question
Operational resilience continues to climb the agenda. Cyber threats are more sophisticated, and regulatory expectations around stability and recoverability are more explicit. At the same time, long-term considerations around quantum-safe cryptography are beginning to influence roadmap planning.
For CTOs and CISOs, these pressures translate into practical questions. How modular should infrastructure be? Where should cryptographic agility be introduced? How can cloud adoption enhance flexibility without expanding attack surfaces?
These are strategic decisions with cost, control and risk implications.
Buy, Build and Avoiding Lock-In
The buy-versus-build debate is evolving into a question of architectural control.
Few firms are pursuing entirely bespoke stacks, yet reliance on monolithic vendor platforms is also being reassessed. Composable, buy-to-build approaches are increasingly common, with firms combining third-party components and proprietary extensions.
Preserving flexibility while minimising structural complexity and long-term vendor lock-in has become a consistent theme in discussions around both infrastructure and data platforms.
A Connected Agenda
What makes this year’s Summit particularly timely is the way these issues intersect. AI initiatives depend on robust data platforms. Data strategies rely on resilient, observable infrastructure. Architectural decisions determine whether performance is demonstrable and sustainable.
For attendees, the value lies in examining how peers and technology providers are addressing these interconnected challenges in practice.
As firms refine their technology roadmaps for the coming cycle, the underlying question is how to design a trading stack that is measurable, explainable and resilient by design.
Early registration is recommended due to the high demand for this event. For more details on the agenda, speakers, and to secure your place, please visit the official event page here.
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