Trading System Resilience in the Face of Cloud and the Next Digital Leap

The theme of resilience has never been more central to the capital markets conversation. That was evident at the FIX Trading Community’s Australia Trading Conference, where industry leaders gathered to debate the future of trading infrastructure, cloud adoption and the role of AI in financial technology.

During the panel “Trading at the Crossroads: Resilience, Cloud, and the Next Digital Leap”, experts from across the industry — including Rapid Addition’s General Manager for Asia, Aaron Pryce — explored how firms can evolve legacy systems, strengthen operational resilience, and prepare for the next digital transformation wave.

The Resilience Challenge

According to recent industry studies, more than half of capital markets participants say that legacy infrastructure limits their resilience and over a third report daily challenges as a result. Yet, surprisingly, fewer than 15% are significantly increasing their technology spend to address these issues.

The cost of doing nothing is growing. Regulatory pressures, real-time reporting and 24/7 market access demand greater compute capacity, scalability and failover speed. As Pryce noted, “Technical debt is like taxes — you’ve got to pay the bill at some stage.”

Forward-looking firms are taking a pragmatic approach: modernising components of their trading ecosystem selectively rather than attempting wholesale replacements. This strategy allows institutions to maintain continuity while incrementally improving performance, control and cost efficiency.

Cloud as an Enabler of Trading System Resilience

For many, cloud technology has become a cornerstone of building resilient, scalable, and flexible trading infrastructure. Rapid Addition has seen this first-hand through projects such as the re-platforming of the LSEG Autex Trade Route — arguably the world’s largest FIX routing network — onto Microsoft Azure.

That project now spans multiple high-availability hubs around the world, managing thousands of FIX sessions and billions of messages per day in support of global equity trading. It demonstrates how the right architecture can provide both elasticity and reliability — the ability to handle volume spikes, spin up capacity in new regions and failover in minutes with zero client impact.

However, Pryce cautioned that cloud is not a silver bullet. Platform stability can vary between providers and effective deployment requires a focus on observability and control. Without deep visibility across infrastructure and applications, firms risk losing the ability to monitor, troubleshoot, or manage costs effectively. “Operational control is vital to avoid surprise bills,” Pryce noted. “Cloud spend can escalate quickly without the right governance.”

Preparing for AI’s Next Act

While many firms remain cautious about legacy transformation budgets, AI investment continues to grow — particularly in areas where automation drives measurable returns. Pryce highlighted two emerging domains: data preparation and engineering efficiency.

The first involves preparing data for AI analysis. For example, transforming FIX message drop copies to a single, normalized format in real time across multiple systems. “The real opportunity is in preparing the data that fuels AI,” he said. “High-performance, low-latency messaging — picking up, processing, and delivering trading data in a consistent format in real time — is core to unlocking AI’s potential.”

The second domain is AI-driven development productivity. Engineers are increasingly using AI tools for code analysis, regression testing, and translation between programming languages. “AI is great for efficiency when the cost of being wrong is low,” Pryce observed. These use cases don’t replace human judgment but free engineers to focus on higher-value problem solving.

Building the Next-Generation Trading Ecosystem

As market participants confront the twin challenges of resilience and legacy platform modernisation, the question isn’t whether to evolve, it’s how. Firms that embrace modular, cloud-ready architectures and invest in observability, automation and data readiness will be best placed to compete in an always-on market.

In a world where trading system resilience underpins client confidence and regulatory compliance alike, the journey toward the next digital leap has already begun.