AFTAs 2019: Best Trading Infrastructure Provider—IPC Systems

It’s two wins in a row at the AFTAs for IPC, which takes this year’s best trading infrastructure provider award, just as it did last year, for its Connexus Cloud. Tim Carmody, CTO, product and research and development at IPC, says the company has enhanced its Connexus Cloud offering over the past year with the idea of adding more exchanges and customers. “We’ve been spending a lot of time really honing what we do for Connexus Cloud,” Carmody says. “We’ve added hundreds of client connections and added new providers. We’ve also turned up more exchanges. We’ve spent a lot of time on our API development and our cloud connectivity to public cloud providers.”

Carmody says Connexus Cloud has added exchanges in Asia, particularly the Ho Chi Minh City Stock Exchange in Vietnam, where IPC has a growing presence. It also connected to major exchanges in Canada like the Canadian Securities Exchange, MATCHNow, Neo Exchange, Omega ATS, and the TMX Group. To meet the needs of its customers who want to trade crypto or digital assets, IPC also added connectivity to ZoozBit and Omniex, as well as offering data from the existing cryptocurrency feeds from ICE and Cboe.

IPC also added additional support for public clouds so that its customers who want more hybrid solutions can connect using the more private offerings of Connexus.

According to Carmody, what’s next for Connexus Cloud is applications through blockchain. He says IPC is looking to bring in more applications through R3’s Corda distributed-ledger system, possibly around fixed income, smart contracts and clearing and settlement. “In the next year, we’re going to start seeing applications launch using the distributed-ledger technology in the Corda infrastructure and we have several customers that we’re working with to do that,” he says. “And we’re going to keep driving toward more connectivity, more exchanges and adding more features into the API.”