Innovating for the Innovators

Many thanks to GreySpark Partners for an interesting discussion at their Capital Markets Innovation Landscape breakfast briefing on Friday.

A lot of their observations on innovation within the investment banks align with what we are seeing at Adaptive and the strategy we’re pursuing. Our views differ, though, on the levels of innovation seen on the exchange side.

We know from the work we’re doing with one of the largest stock exchanges that they are happy to innovate, and comfortable working with firms like Adaptive, when they want to build a trading platform that is outside their core competency.

We’re also seeing significant innovation in the digital asset exchange space where we’ve worked with a number of firms. In the past twelve months, many more have come to us to talk about our matching engine technology as different groups bring innovative new exchanges to market.

GreySpark highlighted four core tenets of financial services technology: a clear delineation of commoditised services’ competitive advantage; interoperability of systems is key to efficient functioning of the technology stack; collaboration or partnership with external entities in developing and implementing technology solutions; and noting that financial services supply chains extend beyond the parameters of the bank.

Hydra Platform enables our clients to build bespoke, differentiating electronic trading capability on top of industry-proven infrastructure.

These are closely aligned with the value that our own technology accelerator delivers. Hydra Platform enables our clients to build bespoke, differentiating electronic trading capability on top of industry-proven infrastructure – be it an internalisation engine, trading workflows, market data distribution components, smart order routers or pre-trade risk checks. It solves for high availability, high performance and low latency while enabling developers to build on top precisely what their business demands. And, crucially, it enables them to bring new innovations to market significantly faster than the alternatives.

At Friday’s briefing, GreySpark also made the point that a clear delineation between commoditised services and competitive advantage is required when deciding where and how to invest. It’s Adaptive’s view that a ‘buy’ approach for what is competitive advantage is the wrong one, as vendor product roadmaps and client needs don’t stay aligned for long. We’ve spent many years inside investment banks, watching vendor products that were once the answer become the problem.