Rapid Addition’s Kevin Houstoun discusses trading infrastructure cost efficiencies with TRADE TV

TRADE TV caught up with our executive chairman Kevin Houstoun at Trade Tech 2019 to discuss some of the challenges we face across the industry.

In an ever more competitive industry, where we are all increasingly focused on the bottom line, what are doing to help clients meet these challenges whilst providing them with that all-important competitive edge?

TTV: What is Rapid Addition focussing on here at TradeTech this year?

Kevin:

“We have always been focussed on building a platform that you can implement any electronic trading process on top of. But today we are highlighting just one of the elements of that platform.

When you think about market connectivity and client connectivity, that’s our platform RA Hub, but observing all of that and reporting in it, that’s RA Monitor, and that is what we are talking about that today.”

TTV: What are the typical challenges that clients face before implementing RA Monitor?

Kevin:

“A client who’s looking at RA Monitor will generally have identified that they need to have more information about their trading process.

Possibly they have a compliance concern, with some of the changes that have come with MIFID II, or they are concerned with how they demonstrate that their timestamps are accurate, all sort of different things.

But one of the biggest challenges we find, as we see with clients who put our RA Hub solution in, is that a lot of the existing monitoring solutions just can’t keep up with the physical volume of messages that are out there.

If you’re trying to monitor millions of quotes per second, going out to hundreds of venues, just the actual computing part of that is a very intense process.”

TTV: What makes RA Monitor different?

Kevin:

“One of the things we’ve done with our FGPA solutions is we’ve built the ability to parse any fixed message in an FGPA.

And one of the things we’re launching at the moment is that, coupled with our RA Monitor, means that instead of needing 10 servers to monitor a million messages per second you can do it with a single server and one of our FGPA accelerators.

This has huge total cost of ownership benefits for our clients, lowers their costs, improves their return on equity, improves their cost income ratios.

In an ever more competitive industry where we all have to look at the bottom line, this is something that we’re all much more concerned about.”

Want to find out more?

We are the developers of one of the first ever commercial FIX engines.

Our product offering now extends way beyond this as we provide our clients with a total electronic trading systems and infrastructure.

However, our high performing, robust, and stable FIX engine remains at its heart.

Get in touch here