Best use of cloud: Adaptive Financial Consulting

The Adaptive Platform Solution is an in-house electronic trading system development acceleration framework. Adaptive has been building electronic trading systems for some of the world’s largest and most complex trading businesses for more than 10 years. Adaptive’s Platform Solution, which leverages the open-source Aeron technology, is now also offered as a cloud-native development, deployment and operational platform for direct use on Amazon Web Services and Google’s cloud platform.

It is difficult to find and recruit people with the skills needed to build and deploy the high-performing resilient electronic trading systems firms need today. Developers need expertise in cloud technologies, distributed systems engineering, multithreading, messaging, application programming interface (API) design and end-to-end (E2E) testing, as well as financial trading. Using the Adaptive platform, development teams can focus on building business logic to differentiate their business, reduce their time-to-market and be flexible in an ever-changing regulatory landscape.

Firms can make significant gains in delivery times by using the public cloud. The Adaptive platform enables the quick creation of development, user acceptance testing and production environments. Using cloud infrastructure-as-code approaches and scripts, secure production environments can be deployed in a matter of days.

The Adaptive Platform Solution provides an innovative approach to fault tolerance for cloud-native applications and offers increased productivity to development teams. It enables developers to build resilient systems and allows for continuous operation of electronic trading systems – live updates can be made with minimal latency impact. Adaptive’s platform solution also allows for Financial Information eXchange (FIX) connectivity through an integrated, flexible FIX gateway for cloud-native deployment, allowing teams to avoid several weeks of development work. The platform also provides immediate web-socket connectivity, enabling E2E streaming between desktop, web or mobile devices.

All messaging interactions between the platform’s components are templated using a domain-specific language, whereby teams specify the API and messages that flow between client and server. This approach also accelerates development time since clients don’t need to develop the messaging system, which is often a source of integration bugs and delays. The platform’s opinionated structure enables rapid system development, as well as E2E testing at the outset of the project. This functional testing framework allows developers to exercise full workflow functionality as a black box.
 

Judges said:

• “Great to see progress in front-office systems in the cloud.”
• “Trading software in the cloud has significant distribution potential if scale and latency challenges are resolved – Adaptive seems to have done so.”

Matt Barrett, chief executive officer and co-founder at Adaptive Financial Consulting, says:

“The industry’s financial services institutions needed an electronic trading technology solution that was scalable, resilient and cloud-native. We are pleased to have delivered that with our technology platform. Adaptive is proud to have been recognised by Risk.net not only for the value we bring to the finance sector, but also for our innovative nature. We look forward to bringing to market more technology solutions as the sector continues to experience ever more demand for fault tolerance, low latency and changing regulatory compliance needs.”

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