AFTAs 2025: Most innovative third-party technology vendor (infrastructure)—HPR

Overview

Needham, Mass.-based HPR is a provider of high-performance trading and risk technology to capital markets firms on both sides of the industry. It is also the name of a platform-as-a-service that adapts to clients’ performance and functionality goals and is designed to scale to accommodate clients’ needs. Clients can rapidly onboard and upgrade the platform seamlessly, avoiding errors and delays typical in stitched-together solutions. On a volatile trading day where over 22 billion shares were traded, HPR operated flawlessly, according to a tier-one bank client. Rooted in networking and cloud leadership, HPR is engineered for a hardware-accelerated future. The firm defines innovation as growth with performance.

Surfacing innovation  

HPR invests in relationships with banks and trading end-users, hosting hackathons and surfacing ideas for advancements in testing and new hardware-based solutions. This environment drives new product development and optimization. Annual offsite meetings help generate new ideas, while “do more with less” initiatives that entail applying AI and rotating talent across teams for fresh perspectives similarly foster innovation. Cross-pollination within the firm is intentional—for example, an automation specialist moved into product development and introduced insights that accelerated product development and iteration.

Examples of innovation  

HPR recently:

• Maximized its compute density: What some providers require 10 servers to manage, HPR manages with two, interpreting multiple protocols on a single box without multi-network interface card (NIC) sprawl.
• Launched Spabot in response to recently approved exchange sponsored access offerings, integrating the required APIs and opening a new revenue stream
• Launched an AI initiative to automate and add guardrails to deployments, optimizing configuration updates and releases to eliminate errors

Recent achievements

Leveraging modular building blocks of its electronic trading solution stack, HPR recently designed an exchange with built-in risk checks, from scratch, that is up to 100 times faster than many of today’s exchanges, with higher efficiency, reliability, determinism and security. HPR engineered several new components, resulting in high-performance exchange technology, created by a lean team of fewer than 150 people using a fraction of the resources typically required for such a build.

Why they won

HPR has enjoyed considerable success in the AFTAs over the years. In 2019, it won the AFTA for the best new infrastructure technology introduced over the last 12 months for its Omnibot platform, while in 2021 it won the most innovative third-party technology vendor category on the back of its Databot offering. This year’s win is not due to a product or service, but rather the firm’s commitment to innovation and all-around technology and engineering excellence. 

HPR focuses on delivering trading and risk technology that meets the exacting demands of the market’s obsession with speed, reliability and scalable performance, and is designed to adapt to its clients’ needs with minimum fuss. It supports seamless upgrades and removes the fragility that often besets fragmented infrastructures, while user-firms gain a resilient environment capable of handling extreme trading volumes without disruption. The firm’s focus on surfacing innovation through collaboration, hardware acceleration and AI-driven automation yields regular and consistent enhancements designed to improve clients’ trading efficiency while simultaneously reducing their operational risk, all of which helped set it apart from the other eight entries in this perennially competitive category.