Sell-Side Technology Awards 2017: Best Cloud Provider to the Sell Side—BT

The vendor’s scale is impressive, to say the least. In 2016 alone it added 101 new customers and 3,313 service connections. It also added 13 new content providers—of which it has over 400—and over 130 new applications.

Starting last year, BT also began rolling out its new high-bandwidth market data network in the US, linking datacenters in Chicago and the New York metro area. “We were being told by our customers in the US that year-on-year, the amount of bandwidth they require for market data is growing phenomenally,” Yousaf Hafeez, head of business development at BT Financial Technology Services, told Inside Market Data in September last year. “One of our customers is forecasting, between now and January 2018, a 40 percent increase in bandwidth. You can’t be in a position where you’re putting infrastructure in place, which is great today, but when the bandwidth increases in six months’ time, you’re struggling.”

This year, in February, BT announced the launch of Radianz FX Express, which links markets in the UK, US, Singapore, Japan and Hong Kong, providing quicker access to foreign exchange (FX) market data for traders.

“If you’re a customer sitting in Tokyo and you want to trade on an FX venue in the US, you can now access the market data a lot quicker than you could have done previously—turn-up of Radianz services with this and other infrastructures can be in a matter of days, as opposed to weeks or months—and therefore make a decision whether to trade or not on that venue,” Hafeez said.

BT has additionally expanded its cybersecurity capabilities thanks to new partnerships and has worked with clients to help them meet new regulatory requirements stemming from Mifid II. Furthermore, it extended its virtualized compute infrastructure, plus access to BT Cloud Compute and public cloud compute services for hybrid public/private cloud solutions.

And on the acquisition front, in February, BT acquired IP Trade, a Belgium-based provider of unified communications and collaboration technologies for trading floor environments and command-and-control dispatch centers. The deal was made to bolster BT’s voice trading and turret solutions, which Radianz underpins.

With advancements like these, don’t be surprised to see BT back in the SST Awards winners’ circle this time next year.