Sell-Side Technology Awards 2020: Best Infrastructure Provider to the Sell Side—HPR

Over the last six months, one thing has become abundantly clear: Cloud is not just here to stay—it’s destined to see many more converts going forward. But, no matter what the so-called “Big Tech” cloud providers might advertise, going to the cloud is not as simple as flipping a switch. The winner of this year’s best infrastructure provider in the Sell-Side Technology Awards, HPR, is aiming to make this conversion easier for banks, clearing firms, and quant funds.

The largest sell-side firms have hundreds of disparate systems that comprise their technology stacks—and, for the most part, that worked in the pre-cloud era, says HPR’s founder and CEO, Anthony Amicangioli. The drive to the cloud, though, has been led by the fact that banks are both under immense pressure to lower their costs while at the same time improving performance. “HPR is helping these firms create highly unified electronic trading infrastructure with technology that is on par with what the leading cloud providers have built,” he says.

To help in this endeavor, HPR has been building out its multi-function switch, Omnibot, which includes integrated market access and risk management capabilities, and a little over a year ago it launched CRM-X, which is an application that provides clients with a consolidated, real-time console for managing risk globally.

“These products are allowing HPR’s clients to dramatically reduce their technology bloat and unify their electronic trading infrastructure,” Amicangioli says. “Our clients are now able to run their mission-critical trading systems far more efficiently with improved performance and resiliency at a lower total cost.”

Looking ahead, the vendor is prepping a new market-data product called Databot, which will have both field-programmable gate array and software-based versions.

“The current hardware-based version has a wire-to-wire latency of just 200 nanoseconds, with the ability to parse data in-line, drastically reducing load on downstream systems,” Amicangioli says. “We already have our first Databot client live in the US and the initial feedback has been extremely positive. We are very excited about entering the low-latency market data space and are targeting a full commercial launch of Databot in the fall.”