Heavy-duty number crunching tasks related to pricing derivatives and other complex financial transactions are being deployed in the cloud for use on mobile devices, satisfying a need by market professionals for portability.
The Beast Apps has developed technology to deliver real time, streaming market data, analytics, trading and straight through processing applications to desktop, browsers and mobile devices.
“We have become a thought leader in how a financial company moves to the cloud,” Ashok Mittal, president of The Beast Apps, told Markets Media. “We have acquired as customers the largest exchange, the largest interdealer broker, bond ECN vendors, and market data and analytics vendors in a very short period of time. Everyone is facing the same challenge: How do I move the cloud?”
The Beast Apps provides financial applications in a number of asset classes, such as interest rate derivatives, inflation derivatives, credit derivatives, fixed income, FX, equities and weather derivatives.
Since the financial crisis and the subsequent regulation and legislation that’s been imposed, there is a requirement for greater transparency in all aspects of financial services. “We have deep domain knowledge in the financial services space, and what we’re looking to do is cover pretty much the entire sector of the financial services community,” said Vinayek Singh, CEO of The Beast Apps. “We work with clients that are involved with data, analytics, transactional, or all of the above. That to me encompasses the entire financial services community.”
The company traces its roots back to the early 2000s, when it was called The Beast.com. Singh and Mittal had both been deeply involved in building financial applications at interdealer broker Tullett, which is now Tullett Prebon. They left to create their own interdealer brokerage.
“For the last eight years, we were an interdealer broker using The Beast for what it was intended for,” said Mittal. “We were on the very high end of the derivatives food chain-- interest rate options, exotic options, inflation swaps and options, single name CDS tranches. CDOs, weather derivatives etc.”
About a year and a half ago, the company decided to reinvent itself as The Beast Apps in order to leverage the cloud. “This time around, everything that was being talked about in the year 2000 about whether it was ASP or grid computing, has all come back again with a different name, which is cloud computing,” said Mittal. “However, there are a lot more additional challenges in the financial industry, including mobility apps and software as a service.”
The Beast Apps enables companies to leverage the cloud more effectively by using its “comprehensive infrastructure technology as the enabling technology layer for them to pursue their cloud strategy,” said Singh. “We are working with companies that want to migrate their entire legacy systems and leverage the cloud, or taking the various disparate silo legacy systems and combining them in the cloud. We cover the entire gamut depending on what the appetite for our client is and how they want to leverage the cloud.”
Featured image via iStock
