Opening & Welcome
Andrew Delaney, President & Chief Content Officer, A-Team Group

Panel: Navigating the European markets landscape: Competitiveness, strategy and the Exchange’s role in liquidity

Exploring the macro drivers impacting the trading venue and exchange technology landscape.

Moderator: Andrew Delaney, President & Chief Content Officer, A-Team Group
Simon Dove, Managing Director and Head of Liquidity – EMEA, Instinet
Adam Matuszewski, Head Cash Market Products, Managing Director, Six Swiss Exchange
Jon Relleen, Director of Infrastructure & Exchanges, Supervision, Policy & Competition – Markets, Financial Conduct Authority
Michael Stanley, Execution Services – Sales & Product Development, Virtu Financial 

Panel: Setting the matching engine at the heart of the exchange tech ecosystem – Next gen architecture, microservices and cloud migration strategies

• How do you define the “core” of the exchange in a next-gen architecture — is it strictly the matching engine, or does the definition expand?
• What stays monolithic vs. what becomes modular?
• Are we designing for peak throughput, lowest latency, highest resiliency — or an optimal trade-off?
• How tightly coupled should market data, risk, clearing, and surveillance be to the matching engine?
• Where is the cloud viable and where is it not?

Moderator: Mike O’Hara, Editor, TradingTech Insight, A-Team Group
Ian Salmon, Head of Product Marketing, Adaptive
Magnus Almqvist, CEO, Exberry

Panel: Building the ultimate low latency highway: Execution gateways, order routing and ensuring near zero jitter and determinism

• Beyond speed: where does latency still drive Alpha?
• What are the key hardware, software and infrastructure considerations for building low latency systems?
• How can firms maintain performance and optimise infrastructure for latency?
• Balancing speed and risk: What are the regulatory implications and how can these be addressed?
• How can trading venues evolve their gateway policies to balance the demands for ultra low latency with the industry requirement for fair and equitable market access?

Moderator: Steve Hamilton, Independent Non-Executive Director & Market Structure Consultant
Anvar Karimson, Managing Director, Group Chief Technology Officer, Kepler Cheuvreux
Irina Sonich-Bright, Head of Market Access Product, Global Markets, UBS
Deepak Dhayatker, CTO, Rapid Addition
Laurent De Barry, Chief Product Officer, Exegy

Keynote: How can we FIX the burdens of tightened algo regulation for venues and firms 

• What caused the recent ESMA Supervisory Briefing on Algorithmic Trading ?
• How does this tighten interpretation of algo regulation and promote convergence in Supervisory practice particularly in governance, testing and outsourcing of algorithmic trading systems ?
• What does this mean for venues and firms ?
• How can the newly published FIX recommended practices and extension packs on Algo Testing & Certification greatly reduce burdens, risks and errors for both venues and firms in handling mission critical Algo governance ?

Nick Idelson, Co-Chair, FIX Algo Trading Working Group 

Panel: The convergence of traditional and digital: Tokenisation, DLT based market infrastructure and the unique challenges of digital currency platforms

• How should tokenisation and DLT components integrate into existing exchange stacks?
• What architectural and operational changes are required to support tokenised assets alongside traditional instruments within the same exchange infrastructure?
• How do digital currency platforms reconcile decentralised ledger principles with the regulatory, risk, and resiliency expectations of traditional market infrastructure?

Moderator: Mike O’Hara, Editor, TradingTech Insight, A-Team Group
Wail Azizi, Chief Strategy Officer, Equiduct
Paul Lambert, Chief Executive Officer, New Exchange FX
Jamie Bell, Head of Capital Markets Department, Financial Conduct Authority
Emilie Rieupeyroux, Head of Market Strategy for Cash Equity & Data Services, Euronext

Keynote: Next generation surveillance: Using AI/ML to detect market abuse, regulatory compliance and managing cross venue regulatory reporting

• How do firms ensure AI/ML surveillance models are sufficiently explainable to satisfy regulators and internal compliance teams?
• What controls and monitoring frameworks are in place to detect and manage model drift over time, particularly as market behaviour evolves?
• How can AI effectively identify abusive trading patterns that span multiple venues, asset classes, and jurisdictions?
• How do organisations make AI-driven surveillance decisions defensible in the event of regulatory audits or enforcement investigations?

Rav Kohli, Independent Market Surveillance Consultant, formerly Global Head of Surveillance Technology, TP ICAP

Panel: The European Consolidated Tape – reality, opportunity, and impact?

• Addressing current challenges of the European Consolidated Tape in equities and in fixed income
• What is the current state of play with each of these initiatives?
• Which types of firms are the main beneficiaries from the consolidated tape?
• Can a consolidated tape realistically reduce the transparency challenges of today’s fragmented trading landscape?
• If consolidated tape emerges as a must-have pricing service, how should firms rethink their market data architecture to avoid it becoming a new bottleneck under peak conditions?
• What challenges remain for firms trying to simplify their infrastructure?

Moderator: Scott Charity, Head of Market Structure, BERENBERG
Hayley McDowell, Head of European Market Structure, RBC Capital Markets
Matthew McLoughlin, Strategic Buy-Side Technology Leader

Panel: Ensuring high availability in the shift toward 24/5+ trading – system testing, performance monitoring and cyber security in critical market infrastructure

• As markets shift to continuous trading, how do firms implement continuous validation and assurance without traditional downtime windows?
• What architectural and operational strategies enable zero-downtime upgrades in critical market infrastructure?
• How can observability frameworks be directly aligned to trade flow and business impact, rather than just infrastructure metrics?
• What lessons have been learned from recent high-profile outages or cyber incidents, and how have they reshaped resilience strategies?
• How can exchanges move from reactive capacity management to predictive scaling models that anticipate volatility spikes and liquidity surges?
• Digitalization driving us toward 24/5 – what will be the impact on the equity markets / liquidity landscape – evolution vs revolution?
• Will this lead to a bifurcation of liquidity – retail vs institutional flow – TradFi vs DeFi ?
• Drive to post trade efficiencies – atomic settlement potential prefunding / financing challenges?

Moderator: Steve Hamilton, Independent Non-Executive Director & Market Structure Consultant
James Baugh, Managing Director, Head of European Market Structure, TD Securities
Dmitri Galinov, Chief Executive Officer, 24 Exchange
Richard Bell, Head of Execution Technology, Nickel Digital Asset Management

Champagne roundtables

Join a roundtable discussion for a deep-dive, interactive discussion with your peers on some of the day’s most important themes. Address common problems, benchmark your progress and come away with practical solutions and takeaways!

Roundtable 1. Cloud native infrastructure and modular architecture

• How are you managing data sovereignty and regulatory exit strategy requirements when moving core matching logic to public cloud providers?
• What is the realistic latency trade off your organisation is willing to accept in exchange for the scalability of a microservices based stack?
• In a hybrid environment how do you ensure synchronisation between cloud based matching engines and on premise regulatory reporting or archive systems?

Magnus Almqvist, CEO, Exberry

Roundtable 2. Predicting the unpredictable: observability and capacity planning

• How are you correlating infrastructure performance with trade flow data to identify invisible bottlenecks in execution before they impact the market?
• As trading stacks become more fragmented across cloud and on premise how do you maintain a single pane of glass for operational risk?
• How can predictive analytics be used to automate the scaling of infrastructure before a high volatility event such as a central bank announcement occurs?

Roundtable 3. Engineering for resilience: managing always on global markets

• How do you re engineer deployment strategies for a matching engine to ensure zero downtime during critical software patches or hardware upgrades?
• In a continuous trading environment when do you perform deep data reconciliations and end of day processing without impacting the live trade stream?
• As the perimeter for cyber attacks expands with twenty four hour connectivity how are you implementing zero trust architecture within the core exchange network?

Ben Jefferys, Senior Solution Sales – Europe, Adaptive
Ian Salmon, Head of Product Marketing, Adaptive

Roundtable 4. AI and machine learning in modern market surveillance

• How are you handling the explainability requirement of artificial intelligence to prove to a regulator exactly why a specific model flagged a certain pattern of behaviour?
• Beyond detecting spoofing and layering what new complex cross market manipulation patterns is machine learning helping you identify today?
• How do you manage the risk of model drift where an intelligence system trained on historical data becomes less effective as market structures evolve?

Nick Idelson, Co-Chair, FIX Algo Trading Working Group

Roundtable 5. Achieving seamless interoperability across fragmented liquidity

• What are the biggest friction points when integrating a new matching engine into the existing ecosystem of independent software vendors and order management systems?
• How can standardised interoperability frameworks reduce the time to liquidity for new alternative trading systems and multilateral trading facilities?
• In a fragmented market how do we solve the connectivity problem without significantly increasing the cost and complexity for market participants?

Richard Bell, Head of Execution Technology, Nickel Digital Asset Management

Roundtable 6. Data as a product: overcoming hurdles in cloud delivery

• As you move toward cloud bucket delivery how are you addressing the security and entitlement challenges of giving clients direct access to massive raw datasets?
• What metadata standards are currently missing in the industry that would make it easier for buy side firms to ingest and use tick history products immediately?
• Is there a commercial and technical case for providing real time analytics at the exchange level or should the venue remain a provider of raw data only?

Nick Dutton, Independent Fintech Advisor

Roundtable 7: Post trade services in the era of T+1 and T+0

• How are you re engineering legacy batch processing systems to handle the compressed timeframe required for T+1 and the move toward real time T+0 settlement?
• What role does automation and artificial intelligence play in resolving trade exceptions and breaks instantly to prevent settlement failure in a shortened cycle?
• How are you managing the liquidity and collateral implications of faster settlement and what technology is required to achieve a consolidated view of counterparty risk in real time?

Ends