SST Awards 2018: Best Cloud Provider to the Sell Side—BT

However, BT has not been resting on its laurels following last year’s win and has instead focused on continuing its multi-year project to co-locate in datacenters to be closer to its clients, says BT Radianz CTO Michael Cooper. “We’ve established a physical presence at more and more locations where the financial markets are moving to,” he says. “This is a continuation of an aggregation trend because as everyone knows across assets, the financial markets have physically co-located to certain datacenters.”

Cooper says BT is also working with increasing numbers of firms using public cloud in the financial services industry so that they can facilitate those connections. Integrating with the public cloud, and the increasing interest in working in these public clouds, is one of the biggest trends the company is seeing. 

It is also constantly exploring how it can better provide security for its clients. The company sees its value in providing a platform for the financial markets community, Cooper notes, adding that BT is conscious of new regulations that clients have to face and other trends in the market. BT’s Radianz Cloud currently has around 400 applications running on it, according to the company. 

As part of its commitment to provide customers with what they need to innovate, BT is looking into how best to leverage distributed-ledger technology (DLT) for its clients, particularly around possibly providing infrastructure to support any customers exploring the technology. “I think one of the reasons we’ve succeeded is that we don’t compete with our clients,” says Cooper. “We’re looking to support what our clients are doing, and in this instance we’re looking to provide infrastructure and infrastructure modules that will scale to support our clients’ distributed-ledger aspirations and initiatives.”

Cooper adds that DLT is “a beautiful fit for us because we’re in a collaborative world and networking is the primary function of what we do.”

According to Cooper, the company is working on providing support for new entities under the new revised Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (Mifid II) regime. BT is also focused on engaging with the next generation of buy-side and sell-side customers with its programs to encourage emerging financial technology firms to bring their products and services to market.