About Rapid Addition

Rapid Addition was founded in 2003 with the goal of enabling the shift to electronic trading and automation of capital markets processes. Since then, we have grown to become pioneers in advanced trading technology and a leader in financial systems interoperability.

We partner with many of the world's leading financial organisations to accelerate the deployment of their unique trading workflow and simplify connectivity across complex ecosystems. Read about our story…

Vision

We believe that successful participation in capital markets requires an enhanced ability to navigate complex ecosystems and drive innovation. Multiple data protocols, siloed technology stacks, and shifting market structure all conspire to make change both challenging and costly, prolonging the life of legacy systems. Our vision is to enable dynamic and efficient capital markets by removing friction from electronic trading workflow.

Mission

We empower financial organisations by providing the technology and tools to seamlessly connect workflows across the trading ecosystem and deploy their IP to create unique, competitively differentiating electronic trading capabilities at scale.

Founding story

By the mid-2000s, FIX (Financial Information eXchange) was emerging as the dominant protocol in secondary market trading as the industry electronified, increasingly driven by regulatory change. In response to this fast-evolving environment, Rapid Addition was founded in 2003 with the mission to simplify the adoption of electronic trading, having introduced the first repository-based FIX engine to help streamline communication and trading processes between counterparties.

Rapid Addition quickly became a leader in FIX solutions, partnering with major financial firms around the world. As the FIX protocol gained prominence in automating trading workflows, we focused on supporting adoption by making it easy for firms to handle multiple versions in parallel while integrating custom rules of engagement.

Performance and flexibility have always been at the forefront of our design, and collaborations with Intel Labs and Microsoft further enhanced our solutions.

While electronic trading had become increasingly widespread, significant inefficiencies persisted in both counterparty interactions and front-to-bank automation.

The need to integrate multiple systems and applications across the trading lifecycle, many utilising different data protocols and APIs, remains an industry challenge to this day. Recognising this, Rapid Addition set about designing a middleware platform that was both asset class and protocol-agnostic, and facilitated seamless interoperability across trading ecosystems, and simplified deployment of customised trading workflows.

In 2016 Rapid Addition acquired DET Tech and secured unique FPGA intellectual property through a high-performance collaboration with Germany’s Fraunhofer HHI. These advancements paved the way for the development of the RA Platform, integrating these new capabilities with our industry-leading FIX technology. Since then, we have continued to expand the platform’s capabilities while implementing numerous global deployments across a wide range of use cases at leading financial institutions.