Sell-Side Technology Awards 2020: Best Sell-Side Product of the Year—Torstone Technology

Torstone Technology wins the best overall sell-side product category at this year’s Sell-Side Technology Awards, courtesy of its Inferno post-trade platform, which also won the best sell-side back-office platform in these awards. Inferno’s Agile delivery model allows Torstone’s clients to “run the bank” and “change the bank” at the same time. Although the platform is supported by a single core code base, a configuration layer enables a high degree of client customization.

Brian Collings, CEO of Torstone, says regulation is a key driver of client customization, including Central Securities Depositories Regulation’s mandatory buy-in requirements and the Securities Financing Transactions Regulation’s mandates around legal entity identifiers, static data, and unique transaction identifiers. He says that depending on the asset classes traded and the type of business model clients run, firms are typically in scope for a range of regulations that require reporting and specific risk measures in order to be compliant. Also, where they are located could mean firms have to deal with regulators whose rules are not consistent with global or regional rulesets. “Each of these challenges requires tailoring our solutions to aggregate data in a specific way to comply with a particular set of rules and to ensure reporting is correct,” Collings says.

Torstone continues to innovate its product; its development teams have added high-performance, real-time streaming technologies, such as Kafka, and adopted OpenAPI/Swagger for interoperability with customers’ systems. It has embedded streaming technology into its risk platform—integrated with Inferno—with Apache Flink stream processing for real-time analytical risk capabilities. Collings adds that Torstone is also experimenting with instant messaging technology to automate some of the processes and workflows involving counterparties, which are traditionally performed via email and phone.

In the last year, Torstone expanded its reach in the Nordic markets, connecting directly to central securities depositories, including Euronext VPS in Norway and Euroclear VPC in Sweden. Its presence has also been growing in the Asia-Pacific region. Torstone now has connectivity to the Japan Securities Depository Center. These expansions give clients more flexibility. In addition to that, its combination of a cloud-based model and modular system helps firms to use Torstone on a global basis, allowing them to expand as needed.