Building trading systems has never been more complex or more critical to competitive differentiation, as firms across the buy side and sell side – as well as exchanges and trading venues – face immense pressure from infrastructure demands, market volatility, and regulatory scrutiny. In response, the ability to build and adapt trading applications quickly has become a key strategic priority, particularly for those firms saddled with legacy monolithic platforms. Developers today need tools that accelerate delivery, integrate cleanly with existing infrastructures, and can be rapidly adapted to accommodate the fast-changing requirements of the modern trading environment.
The result is a growing shift toward reusable frameworks, low-code platforms, and interoperability layers that abstract away infrastructure concerns and allow technologists to focus on domain logic. The goal of these platforms is to shorten time-to-market for new features, improve resilience through composable architecture, and dramatically reduce the maintenance burden of bespoke systems. Whether it’s enabling smart desktop integration, managing low-latency workflows, or deploying microservices-based execution engines, today’s platforms are increasingly designed to bridge the gaps between speed, scalability and adaptability.
What distinguishes the most effective platforms is their capital markets focus. Generic enterprise tools often fall short when confronted with the real-time, multi-asset, compliance-sensitive workflows that define modern trading. In contrast, the platforms profiled here offer many purpose-built capabilities: FIX-native support, sub-millisecond latency, containerised deployment options, and out-of-the-box integration with key ecosystem components such as OMS/EMS platforms, market data feeds, and post-trade systems.
The following curated list profiles nine leading providers of development platforms and frameworks for trading applications, from low-code environments and interoperability containers to high-performance engines and messaging libraries. Each vendor brings a distinct perspective on how best to empower developers and architects in financial markets. Together, they reveal the tools and philosophies shaping the next generation of trading infrastructure.
Adaptive
Adaptive crafts bespoke trading technology solutions for firms wanting to own their tech stack and differentiate in the long term. Focusing on performance, resiliency, and scalability, Adaptive delivers custom front-office platforms across asset classes at speed.
Key to Adaptive’s approach are its technologies, Aeron and Hydra. Aeron is a groundbreaking open-source software designed for high-throughput, low-latency and resilient electronic trading systems. Its open-source and cloud-native nature empowers firms to future-proof their trading operations. Hydra, a developer platform, handles the architectural and resiliency aspects of high-performance trading. It provides pre-built, non-differentiating components and functionality out-of-the-box, streamlining and de-risking the development process. This allows firms to focus on building their unique differentiating business logic on top. This ‘Buy and Build’ platform paradigm enables firms to control their roadmap, innovate rapidly, and own their tech stack while going to market quickly.
Adaptive stands apart by combining cutting-edge technology with deep market expertise, offering the technological building blocks for high-performance modular trading tech stacks.
Connamara
Connamara is a veteran software engineering firm with over 25 years of experience building custom trading infrastructure. From matching engines and order routing systems to post-trade automation, Connamara partners with exchanges, broker-dealers, and fintechs to develop bespoke solutions tailored to specific asset classes and workflows. The firm specialises in agile development and deep integration with capital markets protocols like FIX, REST, and gRPC.
Connamara Technologies is the product company behind EP3, a fully integrated exchange and clearing platform designed to accelerate time-to-market and reduce the cost of launching or upgrading a trading venue. EP3 combines matching, surveillance, risk, clearing, and settlement in a modular architecture with extensible APIs – ideal for firms that need reliable core infrastructure and the freedom to build around it. Customers such as ForecastEx, ArchitectX, Figure Markets, and Zero Hash rely on EP3 to power next-generation markets. Connamara Technologies calls this ‘Exchanges Made Easy’.
Devexperts
DXtrade from Devexperts is a multi-asset trading platform for banks, brokerages, and wealth management firms. Features that set DXtrade apart as a front-end trading application include:
Modular front-end development with DXwidgets: Devexperts has invested heavily in DXwidgets, a framework that enables fast UI development using prebuilt, customisable components. New widgets can also be created quickly to meet specific requirements.
Flexible delivery models: A full range of delivery models are offered: from low-cost SaaS, to sponsored feature models, to full enterprise deployments with dedicated teams, even source code licensing for in-house development.
Enterprise-grade performance and resilience: The platform is built for reliability and scale, with support for multi-region deployments, automated backups, and modular microservices to ensure stability as brokers grow.
Open platform for integration: Devexperts offers a comprehensive suite of APIs (REST, WebSocket, FIX), making it easy for brokers to integrate third-party tools, internal systems, or custom components, creating a tailored and extensible trading ecosystem.
EPAM Deltix
EPAM Deltix (www.deltix.io) offers a high-performance development platform for quantitative finance, featuring a low-latency ecosystem of integrated components and services:
TimeBase: an enterprise-grade time series database for real-time and historical data engineering. It achieves low microsecond latency, up to 9 million messages per sec per consumer channel, supports petabytes of data, and large-scale data delivery.
QuantOffice: a professional-grade software for developing, backtesting, optimizing, and deploying quantitative strategies and algorithms across all major asset classes: equities, fixed income, commodities, FX, crypto, synthetics, etc.
Ember: ultra-low latency server for trading workflows, order management, execution algos, risk, RFQ/RFS, order matching, that also supports high-performance in/outbound FIX, REST, RPC, and WebSocket protocols.
The platform offers a complete set of SDKs for Java, .NET, Python, and C++, enabling quants and IT teams to build custom, high-performance solutions for trading, real-time analytics, machine learning, etc., across clouds and on-prem environments. It connects to an ever growing list of 200+ trading venues, exchanges, and data sources.
Featuremine
Featuremine offers a high-performance trading technology stack built for reliability and speed in the most demanding market environments. Systems are engineered to deliver deterministic low-latency performance with consistent uptime, making them a trusted foundation for production trading applications across asset classes and geographies.
What sets Featuremine apart is the ability to deliver custom-developed solutions using a fully integrated ecosystem of trading components – market connectivity, data capture, signal processing, execution, and portfolio management. The company tailors each deployment to its clients’ workflows, enabling seamless interoperability and future extensibility.
Beyond deployment, Featuremine provides full operational support and maintenance for the client’s trading platform. Its team ensures system resilience with real-time monitoring, rapid incident response, and ongoing software updates, allowing clients to focus on strategy development while Featuremine manages the infrastructure.
Genesis
The Genesis Application Platform is engineered to build trading platforms and other financial applications requiring high-performance transaction processing, event-driven workflows, real-time data, multiple integrations and rich user experiences. Some of the market’s most innovative trading infrastructure, like Neptune Networks and Octaura run on Genesis. In addition, dealers and asset managers use Genesis to build custom trading automation, integrations and analytics leveraging their existing OMS, EMS and risk systems.
Trading firms also use Genesis to modernise legacy technologies and reduce vendor dependencies, cost and risk.
The unique component-driven architecture and marketplace of prebuilt financial solutions in Genesis dramatically accelerates software builds and creates a controlled environment for AI to be native within the platform. This framework also enables non-technical domain experts to build complex, compliant applications without developer support, providing the first practical way for firms to replace the risky ecosystem of spreadsheets and other ad hoc computing used in trading and operations.
Here (formerly OpenFin)
Here is an industry-leading enterprise browser purpose-built to solve both security and productivity challenges, with seamless integration of enterprise AI. Developed in partnership with the world’s largest banks, Here unifies workflows, protects sensitive data, and embeds AI directly into daily tasks to drive faster, smarter decisions while reducing operational risk.
Unlike consumer browsers, Here is designed for work. It provides the security and control enterprises need while simultaneously supercharging productivity. Just as financial institutions moved from personal messaging apps to workplace platforms like Microsoft Teams and Slack, they have been early to recognise the need for a dedicated browser for work.
Key capabilities of Here Enterprise Browser include:
- An app interoperability framework that unifies the workspace
- Task-based layouts (Supertabs) that reduce tab overload and context switching
- Federated search (SuperSearch) to instantly surface relevant, actionable results
- Enterprise-grade notifications beyond what’s possible with Windows or Mac
- AI Center to embed enterprise AI models directly into end-user workflows
- Advanced controls for security, data loss prevention and compliance
For financial professionals – traders, wealth advisors, investment bankers – Here delivers the security, speed and productivity to protect better, move faster and achieve more.
interop.io
interop.io is more than an interoperability provider; it’s a complete solution that addresses the broader needs of financial services, from the rapid development of new apps to managing multiple apps and the modernisation of legacy systems. interop.io empowers technical leaders and their teams to create a more efficient, cohesive, and agile desktop environment.
Development teams can build new apps in a fraction of the time, exploiting common services for data exchange, search, notifications, user permissioning, access controls and more. Legacy monolithic systems can be refactored one screen at a time – preserving the user journey while eliminating technical debt.
interop.io offers real-time observability to monitor app and user activity, identify issues early, and guide users through next-best actions. It supports out-of-the-box support for legacy tech stacks and web, with .NET, VB/COM, Delphi, Java, Blazor, React, Angular, Dash, and more.
Prebuilt adapters simplify connectivity to Bloomberg, Salesforce, Teams, and other third-party tools. Technologists can create unified, data-aware workspaces that streamline navigation, preserve layout and context, and deliver a seamless user experience across web, native, and Citrix apps.
Velox
Velox was founded by trading technology experts to bring to market a development platform that would enable professional software engineers to build front and middle office systems faster, from the comfort of their own IDE, using idiomatic Java and web tech.
By providing solutions to thorny issues like high performance data handling, state management, streaming data enrichment, entitlement, and rendering, vCore allows the developer to focus on the value-added tasks of business modelling and business logic.
The acceleration-without-limitation design principle allows the developer to use powerful accelerators to avoid repetitive tasks and boiler plate coding without losing the granular control required to implement precise system attributes.
Domain agnostic, development teams use vCore as a single tool to accelerate any build project from large multi-year full stack systems to intra-day discrete tools anywhere in the front and middle office.
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