BST Awards 2024: Best buy-side newcomer (vendor or product)—Exegy

Overview

Exegy’s nxFramework is a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) development framework designed to accelerate time to market for ultra low-latency financial applications by providing production-proven reference designs. This standardized, off-the-shelf offering reduces both time to production and FPGA development costs. Utilizing AMD’s motherboards, Exegy achieved a 13.9 nanosecond trade execution latency, delivering the lowest tick-to-trade latency in any published STAC-T0 benchmark.

The solution  

The results of the STAC-T0 test—a test that measures the tick-to-trade network-I/O latency of a trading platform regardless of the hardware and software making up the stack under test—showcased how Exegy’s nxFramework, in collaboration with AMD, pushed the limits of the technology needed for ultra low-latency trading across the capital markets. This innovation combines hardware acceleration, FPGA flexibility, and low-latency networking to ensure precise and repeatable performance, allowing clients to achieve the fastest trade execution speeds possible using industry-standard hardware and a standardized FPGA framework.

Secret sauce  

This framework is unique in offering off-the-shelf capabilities for FPGA development like reference designs and IP configuration. It represents previously unavailable standardization in FPGA and hardware development, providing firms with a blueprint for creating and replicating the technology, while maintaining speed. Exegy’s nxFramework provides clients with scalability and flexibility, without compromising agility or performance.

Recent milestones

• Conducted a latency test using AMD hardware for the STAC-T0 benchmark, resulting in record-breaking latency
• Developed a standardized and repeatable reference design of how to achieve 13.9 nanosecond latency with AMD/nxFramework
• Introduced intraday signals to Exegy’s iceberg order detection offering, Liquidity Lamp. Quantitative traders can now see the volume of iceberg (reserve) orders throughout the day using summary files delivered every ten minutes

Future objectives

Roll out nxFramework as a product available for existing and new Exegy clients.

Why they won

St. Louis, Missouri-based Exegy, a provider of market data solutions, trading platforms, and predictive signals for the financial services industry founded in 2003, wins its first ever WatersTechnology award thanks to its groundbreaking nxFramework. The FPGA framework offers user-firms previously unavailable standardization in FPGA and hardware development, thus providing them with a blueprint for replicating the technology and by so doing reduce the time to market for ultra low-latency applications.

Winning this category in the BST Awards by no means guarantees the recipient commercial success. After all, developing a new technology or service is only half the battle. The other half centers on getting clients to adopt and pay for it, which is where the really hard work begins. That said, Exegy knows a thing or two about taking new products and services to market and there is little doubt that the nxFramework will strike a chord with some of the more niche buy-side shops with algo and high-frequency trading businesses. There will no doubt be similar appeal for the framework across the sell side. What remains to be seen is the extent of the framework’s adoption across an industry where the business case for technology developments, acquisitions and implementations are increasingly scrutinized by executives.     

Previous recipients of this category include Ediphy (2023), FundGuard (2022), FX HedgePool (2021), Matrix IDM (2020), Finbourne Technology (2019), AxeTrading (2018), and Thasos Group (2017).