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: Reviewing the Latency Landscape and the Next Generation of Ultra-Low Latency Infrastructure

Date: 17 September 2026 Time: 10:00am ET / 3:00pm London / 4:00pm CET Duration: 50 minutes Ultra-low latency is no longer the preserve of a handful of proprietary trading firms. As new asset classes electronify, data volumes surge, and regulatory expectations around execution quality and resilience tighten, the performance demands on trading infrastructure are broadening...

BLOG

Nasdaq Continues to Build Out Always-On Market Infrastructure with LeveL Markets Acquisition

Nasdaq has agreed to acquire LeveL Markets, operator of one of the largest alternative trading systems (ATSs) for US equities, as part of a broader strategy to build infrastructure for increasingly continuous markets, spanning traditional exchanges, alternative liquidity venues and emerging digital and tokenised assets. The acquisition, announced this week, will bring LeveL’s institutional execution...

EVENT

RegTech Summit London

Now in its 10th year, RegTech Summit London will bring together the RegTech ecosystem to explore how the European capital markets financial industry can leverage technology to innovate the compliance function and response.

GUIDE

RegTech Suppliers Guide 2019

Welcome to our brand new RegTech Suppliers Guide. This unique guide provides detailed data profiles on close to 100 suppliers in the RegTech world, offering you an unrivalled selection of solutions for your most pressing financial regulatory challenges. The aim of the A-Team’s RegTech Suppliers Guide is to steer you through this complex marketplace, offering...