BST Awards 2025: Best cloud provider to the buy side—Iress Trading and Market Data (Iress TMD)

Overview

Iress FIX Hub (IFH) is a managed, cloud-based FIX connectivity platform designed to simplify and enhance buy-side connectivity to brokers and trading venues. By removing the need for multiple bilateral connections, IFH reduces infrastructure overheads and enables firms to go live in as little as a single day. IFH addresses time-consuming onboarding, complex certification and fragmented workflows across global financial markets.

The solution  

IFH provides cloud-native connectivity with secure, low-latency market access via five regional hubs and private cross-regional connectivity. By removing reliance on legacy infrastructure such as VPNs, firms gain direct, resilient market access with reduced costs and overheads. Its advanced mapping engine supports FIX 4.2 and 4.4 with flexible manipulation, while private cross-regional links ensure consistent performance. Real-time deployment, integrated monitoring and self-service visibility allow clients to manage everything from simple to highly complex connectivity needs.

Secret sauce  

IFH differentiates itself by combining the benefits of cloud-native performance and resilience, flexible session management and an advanced mapping engine with self-service visibility into FIX flows (via MyIress). Unlike traditional network hubs, Iress furnishes clients with configurable risk controls and instant deployment of complex, trade-specific rules at scale, reducing their reliance on vendor intervention. This combination of global reach, configurability and operational oversight transforms FIX connectivity from a passive utility into an interactive, high-performance trading environment.

Recent milestones

• External monitoring: Supports proactive visibility into platform performance and early issue detection
• Expanded global reach: Private link connectivity across AWS zones for faster, more secure access to all five IFH regional hubs
• Enhanced resilience: 99.9% uptime achieved through cloud-native platform upgrades, proactive monitoring and disaster recovery

Future objectives

Iress TMD plans to:

• Expand its risk and self-service management modules within the interop.io framework, adding kill, contingency and risk switches directly into client workflows for proactive compliance control at the FIX layer
• Launch cloud liquidity adapters to provide plug-and-play API connectivity to third-party venues
• Add more advanced data insights taking advantage of the cloud to transform FIX activity into actionable trading, risk and compliance intelligence

Why they won*

Melbourne-based Iress TMD made a bit of history earlier this year when it won the best trading network category in the WatersTechnology Asia Awards, its first win in any of WatersTechnology’s seven awards programs. This year’s BST Awards win shows that Iress’ inaugural success was no fluke.

Time to market for new services and implementations is fast becoming once of most important considerations for firms on both sides of the industry, as they seek to be up and running in the shortest possible time once contracts have been signed. It is a key criterion firms increasingly scrutinize whenever entering into a new relationship with any service provider―they simply will not tolerate timeframes that they believe are unreasonable, an issue Iress appears to understand well. 

The firm’s Iress FIX Hub (IFH), a cloud-native, globally scalable platform that connects buy-side firms to brokers and trading venues by eliminating bilateral links and legacy infrastructure, enables new clients to be up and running within a day. Its five regional hubs and private cross-regional links deliver resilient, low-latency connectivity with consistent global performance. However, what really sets IFH apart are its blend of cloud efficiency and configurability, offering self-service visibility via MyIress, a web-based application and smart desktop designed to modernize and streamline workflows for traders and other financial professionals. With 99.9% uptime, monitoring and expanding interoperability within the interop.io framework, IFH allows buy-side firms to seamlessly manage risk, compliance and their all-important market connectivity.

*When this category was added to the BST Awards lineup more than a decade ago, it was intended for the cloud operator industry, including firms like AWS, Google, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle, as opposed to providers of cloud-based services, which now includes the bulk of the fintech and data provider industry. This year, we received 10 outstanding entries in this category, although none were from actual cloud operators. WatersTechnology will amend the title of the category for next year’s awards to more accurately reflect the types of entries we know are likely to be submitted.