About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

It’s Getting Better …

Subscribe to our newsletter

… Getting better all the time. That’s my assessment of the economy as far as spending on IT by Wall Street is concerned. Sorry, having just picked up the remastered Beatles classic Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, I couldn’t resist tapping Lennon/McCartney’s track 4 title for this blog post.

I’ll offer just a couple of data points. First, near to home for me, the record numbers that attended last month’s High Performance Computing on Wall Street event. Nearly 20 world-class sponsors supported the day, the exhibit space was sold out, and the entire event was, as Intersect 360 Research’s analyst CEO Addison Snell put it, “packed.”

Another item of news piqued my attention the other day. Mellanox Technologies – a data centre networking vendor – is raising its third quarter financial guidance to a record $32 to $32.5 million – that’s up 26% on the second quarter, and 11% on its 2008 third quarter. We’ll have to wait until October 21 for the final figures but the news is very good. Mellanox’s InfiniBand and Gigabit Ethernet technology underpins low latency trading architectures, data centre virtualisation and cloud computing. Make the connection.

And to put these signals in context, think back just a year to the death of Lehman Brothers and those botched bailouts, and one would have had to then agree with Lennon’s pessimistic contribution to that song, that “It can’t get no worse.”

A final note, staying with the Beatles theme, is to say thanks to Blade Network Technologies CEO Vikram Mehta for gifting copies of The White Album to fellow participants in the HPC on WS panel on “Building The World’s Fastest Trading Network” … and of course – while the company is not allowed to mention it – we now know the role being played by Blade in NYSE Euronext’s ambitious plans, which represent its own vote for the future.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Recorded Webinar: Modernising Equities Trading Infrastructure: Architecture, Resilience and the Economics of Change

Equities markets are entering a more distributed, always-on phase. Liquidity is fragmenting across venues and geographies, trading hours are extending toward 24/5 and beyond, and market data volumes, investor expectations and competitive pressure are all rising at once. Many of the platforms that still underpin the equities industry were built for a different era –...

BLOG

United Fintech on AI, Shared Infrastructure and the New Economics of Capital Markets Technology

AI-assisted coding may be making software easier to develop, but getting it into banks remains a complex and costly process. These challenges are also reshaping the economics of specialist fintech providers, many of which face difficulties securing investment and achieving the scale required to serve major banking clients. For United Fintech, the financial technology group...

EVENT

ExchangeTech Summit London

A-Team Group, organisers of the TradingTech Summits, are pleased to announce that the second ExchangeTech Summit London will take place in May 2027. This dedicated forum brings together operators of exchanges, alternative execution venues and digital asset platforms with the ecosystem of vendors driving the future of matching engines, surveillance and market access.

GUIDE

AI in Capital Markets Handbook 2026

AI adoption in capital markets has moved into a more disciplined phase. The priority is now controlled deployment: where AI can be used safely, where it can deliver measurable value, and how outputs can be governed, monitored and evidenced. The 2026 edition of the AI in Capital Markets Handbook examines how AI is being applied...