The client, a market leader in bonds trading, is expanding to new markets, acquiring new businesses, introducing products and adding features to existing offerings. To support its growth plans, it needed an agile, modern, cloud-based platform.

Some of the business needs the client wanted to address with the new solution were:

• How do we achieve scale with minimal latency in operations and service?
• How do we integrate new businesses seamlessly and without disruption?
• How do we roll out new features faster to improve customer experience and get a competitive edge?
• How can we use data to help customers make better trading decisions? How can we monetize the data?

As a solution partner, we had to not only create a new IT architecture for the client’s trading platform but also constantly re-engineer and improve the architecture to quickly meet emerging business needs.

We deployed a scalable, highly available auctions solution on the AWS cloud using Java, Springboot, React JS, React, Redis, and Kafka.

• Optimized algorithms now achieve best matching with minimal latency while offering full price transparency.
• Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) provide greater insight and real-time price discovery for specific asset classes.

The new cloud-based architecture enabled the client to create products and monetize market data. The products helped customers get accurate data in real-time to take better and faster trading decisions.

Test automation across the trade lifecycle using a combination of C#, Ranorex, Test Rails helped the client update user interfaces (UI) without reducing performance; it eased integration linkages between the acquired solution’s frontend and the client’s existing backend.

The introduction of Agile methodology and the cloud-native application has helped the client significantly speed up time-to-market for new releases – it’s now able to make releases several times a year.

The new IT architecture now allows the client to offer trading in Muni bonds (an acquired product) and US treasuries (a new service). The solution also enables the client to support Chinese markets.