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

A-Team Insight Blogs

Occupy Latency?

Subscribe to our newsletter

Well it’s Friday, hence the wacky headline. The exact goals of the Occupy Movement might be hard for many to fathom, but their slogan “We are the 99%” has stuck in many people’s minds. That includes mine as I was completing a white paper for CFN Services on the benefits of leveraging managed infrastructure for low-latency trading.

What’s becoming clear in that world is that it’s a two tier market. Some firms will continue to spend just about anything to be the fastest, which these days means shaving single microseconds, even nanoseconds, off the latency of trading systems. But to many, many other firms, while low latency matters a lot, it does not to such an extreme degree, and other factors – like system agility, time to market, cost of operation – are just as important. So we have the 1% and the 99%, or at least a similar model.

While the 1% will continue to be cool and sexy – think co-lo, FPGAs, IPC, in-memory, over-clocking, and all those buzzwords – it’s the efforts of the 99% that will account for much of the focus and spend on low-latency technologies. And I expect managed services to be an increasingly important delivery channel for those technologies.

Check out the white paper here.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Upcoming Webinar: How to move to a modern, component based trading architecture using a Buy AND Build approach

Date: 7 May 2026 Time: 10:00am ET / 3:00pm London / 4:00pm CET Duration: 50 minutes To remain competitive in today’s electronic markets, firms need trading architectures that support rapid innovation, effortless integration of new capabilities, and the agility to respond to shifting market demands. This is prompting technology leaders to move beyond the traditional...

BLOG

WFE Signals Extended Trading Hours Feasible, but Warns Settlement Systems Must Catch Up

The World Federation of Exchanges (WFE) has published new research concluding that extended trading hours, including near round-the-clock markets, are technologically feasible, but their long-term sustainability depends on coordinated reform across clearing, settlement and payment infrastructure. In Extending Exchange Trading Hours, the WFE examines proposals from major U.S. exchanges to expand equity trading toward 22-...

EVENT

Data Management Summit London

Now in its 16th year, the Data Management Summit (DMS) in London brings together the European capital markets enterprise data management community, to explore how data strategy is evolving to drive business outcomes and speed to market in changing times.

GUIDE

Corporate Actions Europe 2010

The European corporate actions market could be the stage of some pretty heavy duty discussions regarding standards going forward, particularly with regards to the adoption of both XBRL tagging and ISO 20022 messaging. The region’s issuer community, for one, is not going to be easy to convince of the benefits of XBRL tags, given the...