Mark Etherington is Chief Technology Officer of REDI.
What were the major themes of your business in 2015?
For REDI, 2015 was in many ways about setting the stage for the company’s next chapter, as the year saw the conclusion or near conclusion of several major platform and infrastructure projects that have been in flight for the past 18-24 months. Among other initiatives, we stood up and migrated into new data centers globally, filled the functional and regional gaps in our product offering and are nearly complete with the re-architecting of our platform. There’s a bit of final QA testing and hardening on some of these projects that will be wrapped up in Q1 2016, but from a technology standpoint, REDI will very soon be a completely different firm than the one that was spun out of Goldman in July 2013. 2016 should be an extremely exciting time for the company.
What are your expectations for 2016?
The past few years have seen a tremendous amount of technological change make its way to the trading space. HTML5, JavaScript and other Web-based technologies are steadily permeating our industry, and we expect to see more of this in 2016. The result of this is faster, cheaper and more robust integrations between new some of the exciting new fintech products coming to market and the battle-tested, legacy systems that power much of Wall Street. For instance, we’re working on a pilot project now that allows us to take our new spread trader, which was written in HTML5 running in an OpenFin container, present alongside it third-party market data visualized in a ChartIQ chart, all running on an iPad powered by PowWow Mobile. Being able to tie all those various platforms together like this was simply unfathomable five years ago. The fact that it’s a real possibility today is incredible.