After receiving the Best Listed Derivatives E/OMS Award at the European Markets Choice Awards earlier this year, Trading Technologies CEO Keith Todd spoke to Global Trading about how the firm has engineered its success and where it hopes to go next.
What has driven your success this year?
We are seeing progress and success across all our lines of business. The breadth of our current offering is strengthened even further with our recently announced TT TCA (transaction cost analysis) Futures offering and TT Trade Surveillance. TT Futures TCA offers the largest collection of anonymised futures market data and trade data down to the microsecond, which only a firm like TT can provide with our extensive amount of real-world futures data. Our newly enhanced surveillance initiative expands beyond listed derivatives to cover multiple asset classes and adds dozens of new configurable models for detecting a wide range of manipulative or disruptive trading activities, including insider trading, front-running and naked short selling practices. Our TT platform has already handled more than 2.5 billion transactions in 2024, and that activity continues to grow as we attract new clients and build on our functionality.
How have you focused investment to support this growth?
We have an annual investment review cycle that occurs between July and October, in which we both assess past investments and evaluate new opportunities. All are focused on what may be called FICC (fixed income, currency and commodities) to the sell side and buy side. We are quite thorough in our evaluation of these opportunities, including whether investment or partnerships are the best approach. We also want to ensure we are practical and invest at a rate that is manageable for us.
What has been the customer response?
Across the capital markets space, we are seeing growing brand awareness beyond listed derivatives and recognition that something different is happening at Trading Technologies.
Our clients include the world’s leading financial institutions, professional trading firms and more, including a growing number of buy-side participants. We’ve been truly gratified by customer response to the new asset classes we now serve and the deeper, more expansive level of services we can provide. We just hosted our second annual TT Connect event in London for senior-level leaders from the international trading community, focused this year on profiting from data and analytics. These events cover topics across asset classes and have been fully subscribed and extremely well received for their thought-provoking discussions and ideas.
We’ve had huge interest in our developing FX offering and the ability to help clients by solving some of the long-standing problems they’ve encountered, delivered by a trusted partner that is already vetted by their organisation.
In which areas are you building the team and why?
The strength of our leadership team gives us significant capacity. We have empowered individuals throughout the organisation, encouraging input, creativity and innovation at all levels, as well as accountability and decision-making. We continue to add to the organisation and are no longer concentrated in Chicago, but more equally distributed in locations throughout the world – including London, where we have a large and growing presence. We have more people today outside of our native US homeland. Our voluntary attrition is very small, and our extensive internal staff survey suggests our team is aligned and knows something special is happening at TT.
How will the market see your offering evolve over the next twelve months?
We are continuing to strengthen each of our business lines – from deepening our longstanding futures and options offering, to enhancing our algorithmic trading capabilities with quantitative-focused solutions, to building out our new FX and fixed income initiatives, to creating what we believe will be the industry’s most comprehensive data and analytics offerings, to a comprehensive multi-asset surveillance solution addressing our clients’ compliance challenges. You will see us further expand our position in commodity trading as we take on the equity markets in an innovative way.
