How to Effectively Manage Complex Trading Infrastructure

Running a complex trading infrastructure in large sell-side firms is a tough gig. Not only are you responsible for perhaps the most business-critical part of your organisation, but even the smallest outage or change management error is highly visible to your clients.

Dropping the ball can have significant economic consequences, not least thanks to an increasingly stringent regulatory environment. The fact that your internal users only speak to you when something goes wrong is the least of your worries!

Now try managing this in the new world of remote working!

From Survival Mode to Competitive Advantage

The capital markets industry constantly evolves due to competitive pressures and regulatory changes. Trading infrastructure teams face a continuous cycle of change management driven by trading venues, customer requests, client onboarding, and capacity management.

In recent years, regulatory mandates have often taken priority over business-driven initiatives, creating an overwhelming workload.

Adding to the complexity, many firms operate multiple platforms due to legacy systems or acquisitions. Managing these across various regions and time zones only amplifies the challenge.

Firms must break free from survival mode and refocus on competitive differentiation. Rapid Addition has worked with leading customers to address the challenges of complex trading infrastructure by incorporating enhancements within RA Platform 3.0.

Enhancing Interoperability Across Geographical Locations

Interoperability across geographically dispersed trading infrastructure is critical. The RA message bus facilitates seamless electronic message exchange across multi-region deployments. The same can also be achieved using third-party solutions like Solace.

This makes RA Platform 3.0 ideal for firms seeking a standardised global technology or a unified, multi-asset trading solution.

Ensuring High Availability and Disaster Recovery

Deploying duplicate instances of the platform across multiple data centres optimises disaster recovery and ensures high availability.

RA Platform 3.0 enables state replication within and between data centres and regions, ensuring uninterrupted system monitoring—even in the event of hardware or software failure.

Streamlining Change Management in Complex Trading Environments

One of the biggest challenges in managing a complex trading infrastructure is handling frequent changes, configuration updates, and upgrades across extensive, dispersed server estates.

For many organisations, these tasks are highly manual, involve extensive testing, and are prone to errors. These inefficiencies slow firms down, increase pressure on IT teams, and limit their ability to deploy business-enhancing projects.

Automating Infrastructure Management with RA Discovery Service

The RA Discovery Service simplifies platform deployment and infrastructure management by connecting internal components via service or cluster names instead of specific IP addresses and ports.

This eliminates the need to manually manage hundreds of discrete IP addresses and port entries in configuration files. The Discovery Service dynamically updates mappings, reducing operational burden and improving efficiency.

Leveraging Git for Version Control and Compliance

RA Platform 3.0 fully integrates with Git versioning control, providing a single source of truth for configuration files, scripts, and workflow diagrams.

This approach enhances complex trading infrastructure management by:

• Supporting MiFID II compliance with a full audit trail of changes.
• Enabling structured change review and approval processes.
• Allowing quick rollbacks to prior configurations if issues arise after deployment.

By defining workflows between Development, UAT, and Production branches, technology teams gain complete control over change management.

Continuous Integration and Automated Testing

RA Platform 3.0 supports fully automated Continuous Integration (CI) deployment, with automated testing execution at each stage of the change request pipeline.

Testing occurs in the platform’s Virtual Environment, validating proposed changes in real-world scenarios before going live. Tests are auto-generated using historical data and user-defined scenarios, ensuring comprehensive testing.

By mitigating change request risks, the platform reduces errors and simplifies troubleshooting, ultimately improving service quality and regulatory compliance.

Driving Agility and Cost Efficiency in a Complex Trading Infrastructure

Automation in trading infrastructure management removes bottlenecks, enabling firms to move faster and respond more effectively to client needs.

Process automation also reduces operational costs, simplifies trading environments, and enhances agility. With improved confidence and efficiency, firms can shift their focus from merely surviving to driving business success.