Podcast, by Harrington Starr: Exchange Tech is booming. Here is why…

The conversation and its voices

Recorded live at the inaugural Exchange Tech Summit in London, this episode of FinTech Focus TV brings host Toby Babb together with four sharp voices from across the trading-venue ecosystem. Ian Salmon, Head of Product Marketing of Adaptive, and Mike Powell, CEO of Rapid Addition, share a builder’s view of the market, drawing on live projects spanning new ventures, digital assets and the modernisation of platforms once considered cutting-edge. Veronica Taylor of EuroCTP speaks to the imminent launch of the European consolidated tape, and the practical question of what the market will actually do with it. Wael of Equiduct offers a deliberately contrarian take on tokenization. Together they explore the themes defining the moment: 24/7 trading, the surge in retail participation, extended market hours, the cost and complexity of market data, tokenization, and the regulatory pressure — DORA, MiCA and MiFID — reshaping how venues build.

A market in motion

Change, everyone agrees, is the story of the moment. Ian Salmon describes a growing appetite for technology built for a new set of requirements — 24/7 trading and far larger scale — driven by a decisive shift toward direct-to-retail markets. What felt innovative fifteen years ago, from multilateral trading facilities to early crypto exchanges, is now legacy tech ready for a refresh, and incoming regulation such as DORA and MiCA is accelerating that rethink. Mike Powell adds a note of realism: extended hours are stressing legacy systems, and the harder question is often operational rather than technical. Teams must run longer hours, nights and weekends, with less time to fix what breaks. For established players, launching a brand-new platform is frequently easier than upgrading a large, mission-critical one — as Babb quips, better than dropping a Ferrari engine into a beat-up Toyota. Performance, resilience and speed to market, Salmon argues, are no longer trade-offs but table stakes.

Tape, tokenization and the real bottleneck

Veronica Taylor frames the consolidated tape as a landmark market-structure change, with data contributors and vendors including Bloomberg, QuantHouse, Exegy and Refinitiv preparing for the July go-live. Her aim is to prove how much liquidity European markets truly hold — fragmented, yes, but neither as expensive nor as complex to access as it appears. That thread leads to what many say is keeping the industry awake: market data pricing. Firms want access, but not just any access; they want it easy and cost-effective, and the market is nearing a tipping point. On tokenization, Wael pushes back against the hype. Bring tokenization into today’s equity landscape, he argues, and you create one stock, one ISIN, but two settlement rails — turning it from a feature into a tax, because reconciliation carries real cost. He isn’t against tokenization; he questions the timing, warning of marginal gains for non-marginal costs. Salmon closes on optimism: stablecoins, crypto markets and alternative assets all demand nimble infrastructure, making this an exciting, fast-moving time for exchange technology.