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

Vela Adds to Object Trading to Growing Portfolio of Managed Services Components

Subscribe to our newsletter

In another burst of corporate activity, Vela Trading Technologies has agreed to buy Object Trading, a provider of Direct Market Access (DMA), pre-trade risk, and analytical applications. The deal follows hot on the heels of Vela’s recent acquisition of OptionsCity and adds to Vela’s portfolio of high-performance trading and market data offerings.

In particular, Object Trading adds a fully managed DMA capability to Vela’s suite of managed services, an area the company has been focusing on since its relaunch as Vela a year ago. Vela rebranded in June 2016 after its predecessor – SR Labs – acquired several market data and trading technology assets from the former NYSE Technologies, itself built on a series of acquisitions including feedhandler developer Wombat Financial Software and Harco, developer of the DART entitlement management platform.

According to Vela, the addition of Object Trading and OptionsCity will allow it to offer clients “an end-to-end trading platform with global, multi-asset class coverage; high-performance, low-latency market access and market data; industry leading pre-trade risk controls; drop copy functionality; post-trade processing; trading analytics; plus, a front-end GUI for price discovery, workflow management, and order entry.”

The latest addition, says Jennifer Nayar, CEO of Vela, “will accelerate our market access Platform-as-a-Service strategy with additional pre-trade risk and analytics functionality

The deal is subject to regulatory approval and is expected to close in early third quarter. Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP served as Vela’s legal advisors in the transaction. Goldenhill International M&A Advisors served as Object Trading’s strategic advisors; and PwC acted as Object Trading’s legal and financial advisors.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Recorded Webinar: Data platform modernisation: Best practice approaches for unifying data, real time data and automated processing

Financial institutions are evolving their data platform modernisation programmes, moving beyond data-for-cloud capabilities and increasingly towards artificial intelligence-readiness. This has shifted the data management focus in the direction of data unification, real-time delivery and automated governance. The drivers of this transition are improved operational efficiency as manual processes are replaced by faster, more accurate automated...

BLOG

Data as a Product: From Collection to Control in Modern Markets

For much of the past decade, data strategy in capital markets focused on accumulation. Firms invested heavily in market data feeds, alternative datasets, data lakes, and analytics platforms. Yet despite this abundance, many organisations have still struggled to answer basic operational questions with confidence, particularly during periods of market stress. The problem is no longer...

EVENT

ExchangeTech Summit London

A-Team Group, organisers of the TradingTech Summits, are pleased to announce the inaugural ExchangeTech Summit London on May 14th 2026. This dedicated forum brings together operators of exchanges, alternative execution venues and digital asset platforms with the ecosystem of vendors driving the future of matching engines, surveillance and market access.

GUIDE

FRTB Special Report

FRTB is one of the most sweeping and transformative pieces of regulation to hit the financial markets in the last two decades. With the deadline confirmed as January 2022, this Special Report provides a detailed insight into exactly what the data requirements are for FRTB in its latest (and final) incarnation, and explores what needs to be done in order to meet these needs on a cost-effective and company-wide basis.