Bringing Sexy Back to FIX – Part 2 "Next-Generation Market Access"

Traders Magazine Online News, March 15, 2017

Drew Shields

In my last post, I described the FIX solution provided by TT as “FIX-as-a-service” (FaaS). Indeed, one of the differentiators of TT is that it is a suite of professional trading services delivered using the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model: services that are available from anywhere, on demand, without the need for any pre-allocation of infrastructure or deployment of software.

This is what makes our FIX offering compelling (along with the performance improvements we’ve made along the way), but FaaS is a launching point for two other services that separate TT from the typical “off-the-shelf” trading system: market access and compliance/data-retention.

In this post, I’ll focus on the former, and in a third and final post in this little trilogy, I’ll discuss how to leverage TT for compliance and data retention—even if we aren’t your execution platform.

In a world where margins are shrinking, providing market access is becoming increasingly difficult due to the significant capital investment required and the overhead of maintaining exchange gateway software, physical infrastructure, and networking while also providing for high availability and disaster recovery. As a result, banks, brokers and FCMs are rethinking how they provide this service to a broad range of customers. This is where TT can step in.

Obviously anyone using the TT user interface and suite of automated trading tools for execution is leveraging our market access by default, but by providing FaaS, we have created a way for market access providers to transform the way they deliver access to markets. Without investment in infrastructure, these firms can now enable markets for their customers as easily as pointing FIX applications at our flexible infrastructure: no servers to buy and manage, no need to manage failover and disaster recovery, no need to employ a team of people maintaining exchange gateways. In that sense, then, a natural extension of FaaS is what we’re calling “Market-Access-as-a-Service.”

Traditionally, adding a new market can take months (even with hosted solutions) because of the time required for our clients to acquire hardware or bandwidth, test the new gateway, and deploy and configure the software. With TT, the game has changed. You can add a new market one of two simple ways.

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