TT at Three: The Next Wave

The following is blog posting by Rick Lane, CEO of Trading Technologies, and which originally appeared on its corporate website.

At the start of last year’s FIA Conference in Boca Raton, I wrote a blog comparing the TT platform to my twin toddlers (all three turned two that year). With another year and many milestones under their belt, my now 3½-year-old children seem to have become... actual people. Whereas the first couple years seemed to be packed with equal parts novelty and anxiety, now life is really all about getting used to the new normal: that we have two more roommates living with us.

Perhaps the analogy is now weakening, but the truth is a similar thing has happened at TT over the last 12 months.

Three years ago, we set in motion what would become a complete reimagining of our firm and of how technology would be built in capital markets. We were creating a foundation that would allow us to build solutions that the industry didn’t know were possible. And while the lion’s share of our resources and attention during the first couple of years were spent nurturing the platform, educating and migrating our clients and partners, this last year something incredibly exciting happened: it all became normal.

Mundane even. But in our case, mundane was a good thing. It meant that we were no longer having to define, educate or even convince (“Sorry, no bank will use the cloud” – every bank, circa 2012), and that we could finally start getting to the really exciting stuff—building the types of solutions that inspired this platform from day one. It also meant the beginning of a pretty major change in what TT the company was all about.

TT is no longer a screen company.

Of course, TT will always build screens, and with the institutional knowledge and expertise built up over nearly 25 years of creating the industry’s leading front-end for the world’s most demanding end users, I suspect “screens” will always be a defining aspect of what we do. But these screens now sit atop a foundation that is already enabling our clients and partners to redefine their businesses in ways far beyond the desktop.

That technology foundation has allowed us to organize our business along three primary verticals: trading, infrastructure, and data:

Trading

• Over the next 12 months alone, we will be adding 17 new markets, more than we’ve ever added in that amount of time.
• We’re building workflows and solutions to an ever-broadening user community with advanced options trading features.
• We’ve built the industry’s first bridge between the institutional trading community and the spot cryptocurrency markets with our integration to Coinbase’s GDAX platform.
• And we’re innovating across an expanding trade lifecycle with TT Score, our groundbreaking trade surveillance platform.

Infrastructure

• With an ever-expanding global footprint and network backbone (including new colocated data centers in Hong Kong, London and Tokyo, with Korea and others later in 2018), TT offers an unprecedented level of access to firms that require the lowest latency and broadest global market coverage in the world.
• Combined with innovations like FIX-as-a-Service, this global backbone is redefining how the world’s largest banks and FCMs provide turnkey market access to their client base.
• Solutions like TT Prime offer the most latency-sensitive trading firms dedicated, highly tuned infrastructure anywhere on our global network, with zero commitment, integration or installation required.

Data

• Five years on and we’re still the only platform that puts every transaction that you, your firm or your clients have ever done right at your fingertips.
• And while a “forever audit trail” was novel when we introduced the innovation in 2013, today we’re marrying this (still unmatched) capability with solutions like TT Score, algo backtesting and full-depth historical market data across every exchange we support.
• This means the professional trading community has unprecedented access to the types of data that can literally transform a trading business. All out of the box.

And we’re literally just getting started. At TT, what drives us every day is the pursuit of our long-term vision: to become the “operating system” of capital markets. The technology foundation that may someday make this goal a reality is now very real and growing faster than anything we’ve ever done at TT. So in that sense, not very mundane after all.