Hyannis Port Research (HPR), provider of advanced capital markets infrastructure (CMI) technologies, has announced that a global investment bank has gone live on the HPR platform in Europe. With the launch, the bank is now using HPR’s Riskbot® in EMEA, the Americas and Asia-Pacific, enabling it to provide its trading clients with sub-microsecond DMA (direct market access) to Cboe Europe, Euronext, LSE, Turquoise and Xetra.
Since 2011, HPR has steadily grown its market share across the Americas and Asia-Pacific. Today, approximately 15% of the Australian market’s equity volume and approximately 10% of the US market’s equity volume is handled by HPR’s technology.
We’ve built our business by working hand-in-hand with clients to simplify and solve their increasingly complex risk and compliance requirements,” said HPR CEO Anthony Amicangioli. “We’re excited to expand our footprint into Europe, with one of the world’s largest global investment banks now pushing a considerable portion of the overall market’s equity flow through our platform.
HPR’s platform includes its two flagship products for low latency market access: Riskbot® and Softbot®. Targeted to banks and brokers who provide sponsored access services, Riskbot is a hardware-based gateway with a latency of just 360 nanoseconds. Softbot, geared toward less latency-sensitive institutions including broker dealers, proprietary trading firms and quantitative and statistical arbitrage hedge funds, is a software-based solution with a latency of approximately five microseconds. Both provide nearly 50 highly customizable risk parameters, including “fat finger” checks, client credit checks, broker-mandated checks and regulatory compliance checks.
In Europe, MiFID II’s Market Abuse Regulation (MAR) and MiFIR’s trade and transaction reporting requirements have introduced significant new compliance requirements for banks and brokers who provide sponsored access. Riskbot and Softbot address the most challenging of these requirements, including:
- Multiple pre-trade risk and compliance checks at both the trade- and portfolio-levels;
- Comprehensive implementation of time stamping requirements;
- Best execution substantiation;
- Resiliency, capacity and the ability to ensure orderly trading and high availability;
- Complete support of both pre- and post-trade transaction reporting requirements.
As banks’ regulatory compliance demands are increasing, they also face mounting pressure to rationalize and simplify the costly legacy platforms that often power mission critical trading and risk functions.
Technology resources at most banks are becoming difficult to manage, with a hodgepodge of systems, platforms, software and tools – much of it legacy infrastructure that demands significant resources and capital to ensure that operations run smoothly,” Deloitte wrote in its 2018 Banking Industry Outlook. “As such, modernizing core operating infrastructure is an obvious priority,” with modernization ranking as the most important information technology (IT) trend for nearly a quarter of global banking respondents.
There is not a large financial institution in the world that isn’t currently working to replace their legacy systems, which more often than not are an expensive and unmanageable collection of internal and vendor solutions,” Amicangioli added. “With our core technology platform now fully in place, we are primed to partner with these banks to offer streamlined solutions for the full trade lifecycle.