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: Navigating the Build vs Buy Dilemma: Cloud Strategies for Accelerating Quantitative Research

Date: 20 May 2026 Time: 10:00am ET / 3:00pm London / 4:00pm CET Duration: 50 minutes For many quantitative trading firms and asset managers, building a self-provisioned historical market data environment remains one of the most time-consuming and resource-intensive steps in establishing a new research capability. Sourcing data, normalising symbologies, handling corporate actions and maintaining...

BLOG

Bigger is Better, Says Gresham CEO After Acquisition of S&P Global’s EDM Business

Gresham has finalised its acquisition of S&P Global’s EDM business as the data automation company expands to meet the growing and increasingly complex data needs of modern financial institutions. EDM, which supports more than US$12 trillion in assets, will sit alongside Gresham’s existing enterprise data management business, which was created with its merger with Alveo...

EVENT

RepRisk Sustainability Breakfast Roundtable London

The London sustainability breakfast is part of the global roundtable thought leadership event series hosted by RepRisk in key markets, including, New York, Toronto, London, Frankfurt, Oslo, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Hong Kong and Singapore in 2026.

GUIDE

Fatca – Getting to Grips with the Challenge Ahead

The industry breathed a sigh of relief when the deadline for reporting under the US Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (Fatca) was pushed back to July 1, 2014. But what’s starting to look like perhaps the most significant regulation of the next 12 months may start to impact our marketplace sooner than we think, especially...