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

A-Team Insight Blogs

Options IT Deploys Virtual Exchange from FIN

Subscribe to our newsletter

Managed services provider Options IT has gone live with an order matching service from Fundamental Interactions, with two initial customers – a broker/dealer and an Alternative Trading System – with early trade flow of around 60 million shares per day.

Deployed on the Options PIPE managed infrastructure – which offers co-located infrastructure, access to market data and connectivity – the Fundamental Interactions Virtual Exchange is a multi-asset virtualised order book and matching engine, for use by ATS operators or as an internal order aggregation and execution engine for broker/dealers.

“We’ve seen a dramatic increase among second-tier brokers seeking to improve trading performance and profitability through sophisticated order aggregation, internalisation and routing strategies, which is a new development outside of the tier-one broker/dealer community,” says Julian Jacobson, president at Fundamental Interactions. “We’re delighted to work with Options IT to make it cheaper, faster and easier for those brokers to access the technology they need to optimise execution of client order flow.”

Privately-held and self-funded Fundamental Interactions was formed in 2009 in Boston by Kun Luo, who was previously chief architect for SunGard Trading Systems. This year, the company HQ moved to New York City with the hiring of Shawn Sloves and Julian Jacobson from Mantara, as CEO and president/COO, respectively.

The company’s Virtual Exchange, Trading Appliance (OMS and algo trading) and Fast Proxy (pre-trade risk) products are based on its FIN appliance – which provides a number of market data and trading modules that are typically run as a single process on a commodity x86 server, or an add-in card.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Recorded Webinar: Optimising cloud, marketplaces & managed data services

Financial institutions are under mounting pressure to rethink how they source, manage and distribute market data. Rising data volumes, multi-cloud adoption and the operational demands of regulations such as DORA are exposing the limits of legacy infrastructure, and driving firms toward managed services and cloud-native delivery models that can offer greater scalability, resilience and cost...

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

Data Management Summit London

Now in its 17th year, Data Management Summit (DMS) London returns In April 2027, to explore how to use data and AI to drive measurable business outcomes reliably, repeatedly and at scale.

GUIDE

AI in Capital Markets Handbook 2026

AI adoption in capital markets has moved into a more disciplined phase. The priority is now controlled deployment: where AI can be used safely, where it can deliver measurable value, and how outputs can be governed, monitored and evidenced. The 2026 edition of the AI in Capital Markets Handbook examines how AI is being applied...