About a-team Marketing Services
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: Post-Trade Transformation: Automating Clearing & Settlement

Date: 1 December 2026 Time: 10:00am ET / 3:00pm London / 4:00pm CET Duration: 50 minutes The UK, EU and Swiss markets move to T+1 settlement on 11 October 2027, but the first binding compression arrives almost a year earlier. ESMA’s amended settlement discipline RTS expects allocation and confirmation completed by 23:00 CET on trade...

BLOG

Modular vs Extensible Modular: Choosing Technology for Prediction Markets

By Daniel Davis, Chief Revenue Officer, Connamara Technologies. Ask most people how a new trading venue should approach its technology, and the answer comes back as a binary: build it yourself, or buy something off the shelf. Build, and you own everything, but you spend years getting to your first trade. Buy, and you launch...

EVENT

Buy AND Build: The Future of Capital Markets Technology

Buy AND Build: The Future of Capital Markets Technology London examines the latest changes and innovations in trading technology and explores how technology is being deployed to create an edge in sell side and buy side capital markets financial institutions.

GUIDE

Hosted/Managed Services

The on-site data management model is broken. Resources have been squeezed to breaking point. The industry needs a new operating model if it is truly to do more with less. Can hosted/managed services provide the answer? Can the marketplace really create and maintain a utility-based approach to reference data management? And if so, how can...