AFTAs 2019: Best New Technology Introduced Over the Last 12 Months, Infrastructure—HPR

HPR, formerly Hyannis Port Research, takes home the award thanks to its Omnibot platform. The platform is a sister technology to the firm’s existing Riskbot, which performs 80-plus risk checks in 360 nanoseconds, and sees more than 10% of the US equity market volume flow through it as well as 15% of Australia’s. 
 
But despite Riskbot’s impressive speed, HPR felt that the network switches its systems fed into represented a drag on performance. As a result, the vendor set out to develop a device that would integrate market access, risk management, data and latency capture functionality into a multi-application switch. Through the combination of FPGA-based risk hardware and a network switch within a single device, HPR felt it could create a “net-zero” latency solution by performing risk checks in parallel with switching.

In November 2018, its vision became a reality with the launch of Omnibot.

“Omnibot was HPR’s next step into advanced cloud infrastructure systems. That’s important because the larger sell-side firms are currently engaged in an asymmetric technology race with the market-makers who have their roots in high-frequency trading,” says Tony Amicangioli, HPR’s founder and CEO. “So Omnibot is the first in a series of products and technologies we have introduced to level this playing field.

The company also launched a complementary monitoring technology earlier in 2019 called CRM-X, which provides a real-time, pan-regional view of risk that encompasses all equities markets globally.

“At their core, these two products, along with our Unimus platform, allow incumbent banks and trading firms to move towards a modern cloud trading grid that more closely emulates the service-oriented architectures employed by cloud-native technology companies,” Amicangioli says.

This is the second year that this award has been given out. The inaugural winner was Axioma.